Though fifty years stand between us and the very first edition of To Kill a Mockingbird, published in 1960, they have done nothing to change the power, warmth and sadness captured so beautifully with its words. Like all great novels, the simple yet melodious work from Harper Lee has not become a capsule which highlights the differences of one age and the next, but is rather a timeless vessel through which we see that the fundamentals of humanity, for good and for ill, have remained ever unchanged.
Immersive Narrative
To Kill a Mockingbird is one of those rare books that one simply falls into and is half-way through without realising that one even began. It immerses one within the childhood years of the narrator, one Jean Louise Finch, also known as Scout, who speaks to the reader with the wisdom of hindsight granted to adulthood while recalling the events of her past, the most influential of which centre around the trial of a black man accused of the rape of a young white girl.
Political Sensitivity
Set within prejudiced southern
The beauty of the novel is the subtlety of its approach to the sensitivity of its content: Lee builds up to the main event of the story through the general progression of Scout’s early years, rather than allowing a political bitterness to outright dominate the book. The reader is shown gradually, as Scout becomes more and more aware of her surroundings, the injustice and inequality of standards of race rather than having it preached to her.
The reader, in a sense, grows up with Scout. The transition from childhood to adulthood, while perhaps considered all in all a secondary theme to the novel, contributes in no small way to the pathos of the concept of the ‘killing of a mockingbird’, which is Lee’s depiction for the quintessential destruction of innocence. The injustices of the novel are felt that much more through a child’s recognition of them being as such.
Engaging Characters and the Modern Hero
Obviously the power of Lee’s work comes not just from her construction of the novel as a whole, but from the vibrancy of her characters. In fact, the personalities one comes across in To Kill a Mockingbird are some of the most tenderly portrayed and engaging characters to be found in all of modern fiction.
To be introduced to Scout and her brother Jem, as well as their friends and neighbours such as Dill, Calpernia and Miss Maudie, is to find depicted in words all the things one loves about one’s own friends and family – the adoration of one sibling for another mixed with the expected bitter rivalry; the loving but stern hand of a care-giver; the kindly indulgences of neighbours; all these create a warmth and familiarity that would be tangible even to one who had not the faintest idea of what life in the 1930s south was like.
A Modern Day Christ
But, of course, To Kill a Mockingbird’s most commanding and admirable figure is that of Atticus Finch, Scout’s father, who takes the defence of the accused black man, Tom Robbins. In the course of fifty years Atticus has become the very embodiment of heroism in fiction, and has been adored by many as the epitome of morality. With an unbelievable capacity for compassion, and an endless strength in support for justice and equality for all men, and being one of the most powerful depictions of all that is good within humanity, Atticus Finch can arguably be seen as a modern day Christ.
As a gentle but deeply profound vision of hypocrisy, corruption and the capacity of man for wickedness, with the heart-breaking consequences for the innocent, yet ever tempered with the hope raised by those who stand always for virtue and goodness, To Kill a Mockingbird will forever be a most powerful, contemporary reflection of the essence of mankind.
