Be careful what you wish for, they should tell us book fans harbouring fantasies of serendipitously stumbling upon a lost work (us as individual readers, if not the entire world) of a favourite writer. Remember the excitement and moral dilemmas that bubbled up in 2015 when it was announced that a Harper Lee manuscript had been found? The moral questions had focussed around how informed Lee’s consent was to its publication, for she had thus far resolutely refused to publish anything after To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) and was by 2015 said to be ailing. (She passed away in 2016.)
But upon reading Go Set a Watchman in the summer of 2015, any reservations about invading the late and beloved author’s privacy paled in comparison to the confusion over how to absorb this newly revealed work, in which we revisited Maycomb, a lightly fictionalised version of Lee’s hometown Monroeville in Alabama.
Watchman was written, and abandoned, before the publication of Mockingbird — and its impending publication had promised to lengthen the narrative arc of its central characters, Scout and Atticus Finch. Atticus had taught generations of readers how to wear one’s moral integrity lightly but resolutely with his defence of a black man wrongly accused of raping a white woman, in the face of racial hostility.
The young Scout of Mockingbird had tutored us not only to keep our hearts open to being surprised by people’s better sides, but in standing up to peer pressure to do so. Now in Watchman , with Scout in her mid-20s and returning to Maycomb from New York, it transpired that Atticus harboured racist thoughts. What were we to make of Atticus?
The mistake many of us made, in my view, was that we saw Watchman as a sequel to Mockingbird . Lee was by then not available to give a definite testimony, but could it have been that the Atticus of the two novels was not the same person, that the Atticus of Watchman had been abandoned along with the manuscript by Lee when she chose to redo her novel, which ultimately became Mockingbird ?
But try as we might, once we read Watchman , it was impossible to not connect the two. (Perhaps that’s why Lee did not intend Watchman to be published.) Even if the Atticus of Watchman was not the same as the Atticus of the classic novel, he hovered over any rereading of Mockingbird or viewing of the Gregory Peck-starrer.
It’s human instinct to stack stories together. Recently, I found a bunch of stories about the lesser-known fictional character Jimm Juree in the Kindle store. The Thailand-based writer Colin Cotterill is better known for his crime novels set in ’70s Laos. But Juree, the laconic narrator of four of his books, is a personal favourite. Originally from Chiang Mai in Thailand’s picturesque north and with dreams of being promoted to head the crime desk in one of the city’s newspapers, she is hauled off by her maverick mother to establish the always struggling Gulf Bay Lovely Resort and Restaurant in the country’s south in a province “nobody ever goes to”. Laconically told, it’s an affectionate portrayal of a lethargic community getting on with life, and dealing with crime and mystery.
The last Jimm Jurree book (the fourth) hit the bookshops in 2016, but it seems Cotterill has been publishing short Juree stories as e-offerings. But even as I make my way through them, starting with the latest (the ninth, March 2019), it’s difficult to keep focussed instead of rushing back to the four books to clarify the back-story.
Book crazy
The fascination with series is its own condition. In Latest Readings , his wonderful book on being “book crazy”, Clive James explains how series-love keeps the reader just a nudge away from binge-reading a stack of favourites: “I have just started to read Edward St. Aubyn’s latest novel, Lost for Words , and I can already see that I will have to double back and get on terms with his Patrick Melrose sequence.”
In fact, even when no series is declared as such by the writers, some of us thread them along. Vikram Seth’s non-fiction book about his uncle and aunt, Two Lives , is for me a sequel to his epic novel, A Suitable Boy . And each time Kamila Shamsie publishes a novel, I go back to Salt and Saffron, Kartography, and Broken Verses as a composite offering.
Mini Kapoor is Ideas Editor, The Hindu .
