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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment
Sam Jordison in London and Nancy Groves in Sydney

Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman published – as it happened

Harper Lee, as publication of Go Set a Watchman was announced.
Harper Lee, as publication of Go Set a Watchman was announced. Photograph: PR

Thanks for reading

We’re closing the live blog now, but what a night it’s been. Books have been bought by the bucketload, Sam Jordison is recovering from his through-the-night readathon, and now it’s time for everyone else to get reading. Do join in with our Twitter reading group - as Sam says, Watchman “blows the questions in Mockingbird wide open...”

Back where it all began

“Not even young children were spared the ordeal, or the honour, of waiting in the heat, though by the turn of midnight many were wilting visibly...” The Guardian’s Ed Pilkington was in Harper Lee’s hometown of Monroeville, Alabama in the wee small hours as the books - two for every inhabitant - went on sale.

Atticus: 'a man of his time'

“It’s an exhilarating experience, reading this book,” said Girl With a Pearl Earring novelist Tracy Chevalier on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme this morning, but there are a couple of “kicks in the stomach”. Those wishing to avoid such kicks, the presenters suggested, should go and make a cup of tea - but with the behaviour and attitudes of fictional characters from half a century ago now headline news, it’ll have to be a slow-boiling kettle to avoid spoilers today.

Chevalier had tried - impossibly - to read the book on its own merits, she said, describing it as the story of a young southern woman having to become her own moral compass, now that her revered father has let her down.

“I can see why an editor in the 50s said ‘Let’s go back to childhood, as that’s what you write best’ - those are by far the strongest scenes,” she continued. “What little plot there is dwindles in the second half, and it becomes this big moral debate about racism and southern politics that is a little obscure to us now”, even if the issues burn as fiercely today.

The Atticus of Watchman is a terrible disappointment to his daughter, but it’s “maybe not nuanced enough”, said Chevalier, to call him, as so many have been, a racist - it’s more that he’s “a man of his time in the 50s who [says] ‘black people are not yet ready to accept the freedoms that changing laws are giving them, and I’m afraid of what’s going to happen to our society and I want to preserve our southern society’.”

All this, she concluded, flawed though the book may be, makes for “a more realistic look at race relations and the issues of race in the States than Mockingbird”, the book that presented him - to readers’ enduring satisfaction - in such saintly terms.

Read along with us on Twitter, chapter by chapter

So now you’ve got your copy – or you will have soon. After all the hype and analysis, it’s time to start reading. And once you get stuck in, why not discuss it with us on Twitter? It’s very simple: simply add the number of the chapter you’re reading to the hashtag #GdnWatchman – so for example, to comment on chapter 5, tweet with #GdnWatchman5. We’ll be joining you and following the conversation here. And why not take a selfie and record a short video review while you’re at it? All the rules – and what you can win if you play along – here.

Twitter discussion

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Another image Ed Pilkington has sent from the book launch in Monroeville, Harper Lee’s hometown. Here’s an Atticus/Gregory Peck impersonator:

Atticus impersonator

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Breakfast with Harper

Good morning from cloudy London! We’re picking this up after Sam and Nancy’s sterling work – what a night of emotions (here’s Sam’s summary after reading the whole book in a few hours).

Boy, the world is full of early birds. Thousands of coffees around the world are already being consumed with this book next to them. Books and coffee are social media’s best friends, and readers are starting to share pictures of their shiny new copies – together, of course, with a variety of mugs, breakfasts and other beautiful Instagrammable backgrounds.

Never a bad time for a bookish cake:

Other readers have a night’s sleep or a day’s work (or a TV programme’s broadcast) in front of them before they can start reading, which makes it equally, if not more, exciting:

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Did Atticus use the N-Word?

Interesting CNN discussion between lawyer Mark O’Mara, African American academic Marc Lamont Hill and the Conservative political commentator Ben Ferguson.

Mark O’Mara:

“Quite honestly I think this Atticus Finch is the original and true Atticus Finch. I think the Mockingbird book was sanitised back in the 60s when they told Harper Lee to redo it four or five times over two years, because I don’t think the Atticus Finch we are now finding out exists would have been accepted back then. This shows the Atticus that truly would have existed: Very complex, growing up in the 30s 40s and 50s in the South you would not have had a person as sanitised. I like the fact that its coming out now.”

Marc Lamont Hill:

“This is a quintessentially American thing: this white liberal crusader who turns out to be racist. People are sad because they are invested in the idea that we can be changed, we can be better, that white people can crusade for justice for black people and I think that’s true but this book can be a more powerful tale – that even in the midst of that, we still have a moral complexity with biases underneath.”

Ben Ferguson

“The first book inspired people to want to be a better version of themselves and inspired them to help others and do great things so this is kinda like a letdown, it’s like finding that someone you looked up to is a fraud and a phony. I think this book could be as important to people talking about race hopefully in a real blunt way in high school and college classes. It’s going to be a lot more blunt, it’s going to be completely different, but it can be used for good.”

See the full discussion here

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Enough about the art. Now back to the commerce:

Not that we’re cynical, or anything... good to see the Gruffalo and the Tiger who Came to Tea getting in on the fun.

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Atticus: "as fallible as the system that produced him"

Not everyone sees Atticus’s character development as a failing on the part of the novel itself.

Helen Razer, writing for the Australian arts site, Daily Review, goes one step further in a post entitled, THE SO-CALLED LOST INNOCENCE OF THAT HOT LIBERAL DADDY, ATTICUS FINCH

Claims that a new, racist Finch are “difficult” or that these represent a “lost innocence” strike me as abundantly stupid on two counts. First, have you read the fucking book? Yes, Atticus was thoroughly charming and I once used his name to describe my perfect partner on an internet dating profile. But to claim that the downfall of a fictional hunk could be a moment of “lost innocence” in an era that has produced the Charleston church shootings, the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson or the Baltimore protests seems, at the very least, gauche ...

Even if Watchman turns out to be, in my view, not as impeccably written as the very palatable novel it would go on to inform, it is a very good thing that we can see that Atticus is as fallible as the system that produced him.

There is no innocence that can be lost here. Just self-congratulation by a white liberal fandom who, suffering this loss, can now get back to the important work of reading Harry Potter as a doctrine of tolerance.

Read Helen’s full article here (disclaimer: she admits she hasn’t read the book yet).

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Time magazine, not averse to a listicle, has already made its pick of 10 beautiful lines from Go Set A Watchman.

Similes abound:

When she was staring at her fourth cup of coffee the Crescent Limited honked like a giant goose at its northbound mate and rumbled across the Chattahoochee into Alabama.

Dill’s efforts to disentangle himself with dignity were only moderately successful; he rose from the pool like a small fantastical water monster, covered with green slime and dripping sheet.

They eyed one another like game roosters.

She could feel his crew cut under her chin; it was like black velvet.

What is your favourite line of Lee’s prose so far?

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And talking of Monroeville, someone has captured the crowd outside Lee’s local bookshop.

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Of all the people to receive their first copies of the book, none must feel stranger than Harper Lee herself.

Two weeks ago, a lunch was held for the reclusive author in her hometown of Monroeville where she was given a first edition of Go Set a Watchman for the first time. Better get that one signed! PBS film-maker Mary McDonagh Murphy was there and her web film is now viewable for US readers on the PBS site with talking heads from Lee’s lawyer, agent and friends.

Listen extremely carefully and you’ll even hear Lee herself. “Wonderful – thank you,” she says when handed her new book. Asked if she thought she’d live to see the novel published, she says: “Of course, I did. Don’t be silly.”

Updated

The novel's first canine reader

But everything is now okay because we’ve unearthed a picture of the novel’s first canine reader in the Melbourne suburb of Brunswick. Bravo Brunswick! Is your dog or cat reading along too? Send us your #watchman pet pics, people.

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Huge props to Sam for his all-night heroics. Nancy Groves taking over from our culture desk in Sydney, where Australian readers are taking their lunch hour to get acquainted with the book. Well, not all readers ... it seems like the massive character twist in Go Set A Watchman is causing quite an existential crisis among Lee’s fans.

Here’s a representative spectrum, from hesitation to full on denial.

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Summary

Well.

That was very interesting.

Thomas Wolfe famously said that you can never go home again... And Go Set A Watchman makes the point emphatically. Scout can’t go home. She isn’t even Scout any more. She’s now Jean Louise. Her childhood is long gone, so is her innocence and now she has to come to terms with the fact that her beloved father isn’t half the man she thought he was. It’s a sad story: often poignant, emotional, deeply felt.

But any reader hoping to go back the glories of To Kill A Mockingbird is likely to feel some disappointment. It won’t take you to the same places. It isn’t the same.

It probably isn’t as good, either.

It’s way past my bed time and I’ve read in rather a hurry. I reserve the right to change my mind - and more simply to later on admit that I’m wrong. But at this stage it seems to me that To Kill A Mockingbird is a better story, better told. Here the plot is flatter and slower and the writing more ponderous. There’s none of the drama of the court case, or the mystery of Boo Radley... There’s hardly any plot at all. It isn’t helped by the long bits of internal monologue from Jean Louise. It feels didactic and laboured where the other is light as air...

But hell. It’s probably unfair to complain that a book isn’t as good as To Kill A Mockingbird. What is? And while Go Set A Watchman does feel like a first draft at times, and does have a few rough edges, it’s also full of anger, complexity and moral challenges. What’s more, it contains a few fine jokes as well as some pretty weird slapstick. Much of it is appealing. I don’t regret spending time on it. I can think of far worse books to stay up the night reading. I’ll look forward to reading it again, in fact.

Does it merit such scrutiny? Well, I hope so.

Would we all be reading it if if weren’t for To Kill A Mockingbird? Probably not.

But is it an interesting addition to that book and one worth reading for that reason? Most definitely.

Okay... time for bed!

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I’m done!

I think I may...

Quite the bombshell from Jean Louise’s Uncle Finch in the penultimate chapter. Harper Lee has a few good narrative tricks up her sleeve.

Here's the side of Atticus you didn't want to see

Here’s the side of Atticus you didn’t want to see. (Look away now if you named your child after the old man):

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I’m starting to change my mind about how much Atticus has changed and how much he’s always been... wrong... There are definitely interesting moral complexities in here... And deeply ingrained prejudice. It digs deep...

Now that I’ve just written how contemporary the book feels, there was, of course, a curiously old-fashioned bit of slapstick centred around a pair of breasts pads... Odd chapter. Gently funny, I suppose.

Updated

Chapter 14 contains a lesson in Southern heritage from Jean Louise’s uncle Finch. The troubling thing is that although it was written 60-odd years ago, you still hear plenty of the stuff in there today. Uncle Finch is even afraid of Big Government:

The only thing I’m afraid of about this country is that its government will someday become so monstrous that the smallest person in it will be trampled underfoot, and then it wouldn’t be worth living in.

Could be a GOP stump speech. There are still contemporary lessons to glean from this book.

Less than 100 pages to go. The race talk in Maycomb is ugly

Less than 100 pages to go.... Some of this is definitely bracing reading. The race talk in Maycomb is ugly. There’s searing anger in the narrative. It’s sharp and hot.

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One of the criticisms sometimes levelled at To Kill A Mockingbird is that Calpurnia – Atticus’ Finch’s cook and servant – is never fully rounded out as a character. But she has a pretty remarkable moment in this book. A real lump in the throat moment. I won’t say more, because it’s one you have to read in context. But it stopped me short. Worth the cover price alone almost... And truly bleak. You’ll know it when you get to it.

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This isn’t such a revision of the Atticus of To Kill A Mockingbird as early reports have suggested. It’s clear that Attticus has taken a turn for the worse in his old age. He is not the man who Scout revered in childhood. “You who called me Scout are dead and in your grave,” Jean Louise thinks to herself when looking at her father. He’s definitely changed.

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Mind the spoilers in this post...
Jean Louise has the curse! Jean Louise gets kissed full on the mouth. Someone else is having a baby with her daddy. Again it feels like a journey away from innocence. Although, not always that far:

There was no mistaking it, Albert had stuck out his tongue at her. She was pregnant.

I’m getting pretty tired now.

Hopefully this will see me through. Not entirely sure if I’m cut out for this stunt reading. Although I’m enjoying the challenge of the late night speed read. It’s the closest a book journalist like me gets to doing sport...

I’m now closing in on the halfway point and the plot is definitely thickening. In fact, things have got pretty nasty. Atticus has been reading racist pamphlets and attending pro-segregation meetings where odious racist views are given a full airing. Scout feels he has “failed her”. Bad Atticus!

Interestingly, this ignoble racism is presented as a present failing. The Atticus in the To Kill A Mockingbird was more noble than the man we’re reading about now. Scout used to think better of him...

All of this is very interesting. The book is also shot through with dazzling humour and some fine writing. But I’d be lying if I tried to pretend it’s all pleasure. There’s a lot of exposition to get through. It feels like reading the deep background to To Kill A Mockingbird – like this was the setting and material Harper Lee had to set down and work through before she was able to write that novel. Perhaps part of the reason the world in that book feels so fully-formed is that she went through so many of the details in her head here... But To Kill A Mockingbird’s gain is this novel’s loss. It can be slow going...

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The title explained

Here’s the theology behind the title:

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Another shot in the sunny Southern weather.

Satellite van, Monroeville
A satellite van is parked on the main town square in Monroeville in anticipation of the launch of the book. Photograph: Ed Pilkington/Guardian

The courthouse, which includes a renovated version of the original courtroom which Harper Lee used as the setting for Atticus Finch’s defence of Tom Robinson in To Kill a Mockingbird, can be seen in the background.

Ed Pilkington has sent an image from Harper Lee’s hometown, Monroeville.

Placards outside the Ol’ Curiosities & Book Shoppe just off the town square where a party is going to be held at midnight tonight to mark the arrival of the new novel.
Placards outside the Ol’ Curiosities & Book Shoppe just off the town square where a party is going to be held at midnight tonight to mark the arrival of the new novel. Photograph: Ed Pilkington/Guardian

Early reader opinions are starting to come in...

Another update from Australia. This time it’s Dymocks in Brisbane


Well, it wouldn’t be a major publishing event without a merchandised cloth bag, would it?

(I wonder how many of those things they made?! They were here in London too...)

Updated

Bit of a spoiler here, but, I’ve just read that Dill found out about Jem’s death from a newspaper clipping. Oh childhood! Why do you have to end?


One person’s midnight is another person’s 9am. Australian readers got an altogether more civilised start on Go Set A Watchman with bookshops across the nation proudly displaying their newly minted copies and commuters dropping in on the way to work to snap them up.

Readings, Melbourne


Potts Points, Sydney

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The car rolled over a particularly bad hump in the road and deposited Jem without.

Harper Lee certainly has a way with words...

There have been quite a few childhood flashbacks over chapters four and five, and they’ve been charming. Dill has made an appearance. Jem has taken a pratfall from the back of Atticus’ car. They’ve jumped in a creek. Hot afternoons and laughter. You can understand why Harper Lee’s editor found them so interesting.

Although that doesn’t take away from the fact that the request to Ms Lee to develop these scenes further and go deeper into childhood was inspired. One of the greatest editorial interventions in history, even...

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She’s joking, but I was actually a bit worried when I walked home. What if someone did take it? Where would this blog be then?

I got stuck into the book on the way home. When I wasn’t taking pictures of myself pretending to get stuck into the book, anyway:

One thing that’s for sure is that Waterstones Piccadilly can put on a good book launch. That was most enjoyable. It was sad to leave. People were still thronging the tills, drinking at the cafe and tucking into the book when I left.

Well, that was fun. The queue stretched right to the back of the shop. There was a big countdown, lots of cheering then a big rush to get copies and get to the tills.
I’ll see if I can post a few photos later. Having a few gremlins with my phone. But it’s time for me to leave this shop anyway. I don’t want to get locked in.
I’m going to hurry back to my digs and will post updates from the novel when I get there. Now, it’s all about the reading...

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Midnight strikes - and the book is officially launched in the UK

Go Set A Watchman has arrived and the tills and tinging...

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Here in Waterstones, the film has ended and the queueing has begun. I’m going to nip upstairs to see what’s happening before I read on.

This is an interesting reading experience. It feels rough in places. Strangely didactic and heavy. Like - as indeed it probably is - a book that hasn’t quite come together. But it’s also fascinating. We learn, for instance, that Jean Louise has lost touch with her childhood friends. That vivid youth of To Kill A Mockingbird has been and gone. Ouch.
There are a few sharp moments too. “We Finches do not marry the children of rednecked white trash, which is exactly what Henry’s parents were born and were all their lives,” says Jean Louise’s Aunt Alexandra. “The trash won’t wash out of him.” Brutal.
“Aunty,” says Jean Louise in reply, “why don’t you go pee in your hat?” Scout still lives, after all!

She was completely unaware that with one twist of the tongue she could plunge Jean Louise into a moral turmoil by making her niece doubt her own motives and best intentions, by tweaking the protestant, philistine strings of Jean Louise’s conscience until they vibrated like a spectral zither.

On the one hand, I like that zither. On the other, some of this prose is kind-of... well... leaden... isn’t it?

Before I plunge on, a quick word on the title.

What to make of it? What to make of it especially given its provenance? It comes from that other bestselling book, The Old Testament. Specifically, Isiah 21:6 - although the whole passage about the ‘watchman’ there is worth perusal:

Prepare the table, watch in the watchtower, eat, drink: arise, ye princes, and anoint the shield.

For thus hath the Lord said unto me, Go, set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth.

And he saw a chariot with a couple of horsemen, a chariot of asses, and a chariot of camels; and he hearkened diligently with much heed:

And he cried, A lion: My lord, I stand continually upon the watchtower in the daytime, and I am set in my ward whole nights:

And, behold, here cometh a chariot of men, with a couple of horsemen. And he answered and said, Babylon is fallen, is fallen; and all the graven images of her gods he hath broken unto the ground.

O my threshing, and the corn of my floor: that which I have heard of the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, have I declared unto you.

The burden of Dumah. He calleth to me out of Seir, Watchman, what of the night? Watchman, what of the night?

The watchman said, The morning cometh, and also the night: if ye will enquire, enquire ye: return, come.

Asses? Camels? Where does that leave us? It’s pleasing to note that Harper Lee has quoted the good old King James version. Although those of a proof reading persuasion among you will notice that in the relevant verse there is a comma after “Go”. There isn’t one in the book title. Apparently, an editor told Lee about this discrepancy. “That’s the Lord’s Book,” she is said to have replied. “This is my book. And there is no comma.”

Did I mention that I like Harper Lee? A lot. I’m also unable to resist the temptation of pointing out how relevant this passage is on the verge of an almost-all-night reading marathon. Otherwise, however, I guess we’ll have to see...
Okay, chapter three. I’m getting the feeling I haven’t quite judged the caffeine intake right... Getting slightly distracted...

Chapter two continues the scene-setting. We see Atticus stooped and old. Shrunken by age. But the maudlin reflections on his mortality are leavened by jokes. “Atticus leaned forward a little, the better to disapprove of what he was reading.”

After that it’s domestic details - and catching up on local gossip. We get the feeling that Scout - or Jean Louise as she is now - is no longer entirely comfortable in Maycomb. She can’t wear the right clothes to fit in any more... Not least because, as we start to realise towards the end, she’s now far removed from popular opinion in Maycomb. There’s a nice moment where she and Atticus discuss how outsiders and the media view the bus strikes and “that Mississippi business”... And it’s clear Maycomb’s out of step.

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How long does it take to read a 278 page book? Luckily, Twitter has the answer:

Of course, plenty of people have read the first chapter. If you’re among them, did it shake you up? It shocked me - and it’s still strange to read it second time around. Scout is all grown up and going by the name of Jean Louise, Atticus is old and ill and “can’t even hold a razor” and, oh my God: “ Jean Louise’s brother dropped dead in his tracks one day.”

Jem is dead. Oof. Of course, when she first wrote Go Set A Watchman, by all accounts prior to To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee can’t have known how this short sharp sentence about his passing would stab her readers right in the gullet. But even so. What a way to learn. And think about this: Jem was probably also dead the whole time that the narrator of To Kill A Mockingbird was telling us about him. Which adds a new layer of poignancy to the memory does it not? And a new fragility to the story. That robust, sensible boy was just wiped out suddenly one day, almost at random. It adds an interesting new perspective, doesn’t it?

Okay! I’m reading. More anon...

Just to give Sam some time to get reading, signs that Australia is beginning to wake up ...

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The reason I’m here in That London, instead of tucked up in bed at home in Norwich is that my initial attempts to get hold of an advance reading copy came to nothing. Until the embargo broke on Friday, this novel has been kept under tight wraps both figuratively and in a pleasingly literal way. Copies have been sent out to bookstores in shrink wrapped boxes, stored under the watchful eye of closed circuit TV cameras and there are currently very few people in the world who have held it in their hands.

That’s all about to change of course. This is the most pre-ordered book since the fabled Harry Potter VII. Millions of people around the world have already reserved their copy. Millions more will be trooping into the shops over the next few days. Millions more will be reading it. But not before me. Because... I just got hold of a copy!

I’m not going to be the first reader. Alas! The embargo on Go Set A Watchman was broken three days ago when Michiko Kakutani’s review ran in the New York Times.

Since then, things have been, as someone from the publisher just put it to me, “fucking mental.”

The review itself is rather a curious thing. Kakutani doesn’t usually hold back, but this one struck me as rather cautious. It almost reads like a York Notes summary of the novel. Presumably she had to read it very quickly. And maybe she had an eye on posterity. If I were in her place, I’d perhaps be worried about being remembered as the person who reviewed Go Set A Watchman first and whose opinion was shared by no one afterwards...

Even so, the New York Times got their splash and their headline. Atticus Finch is not as sainted as some might have thought him from reading To Kill A Mockingbird. He may even be racist. As the always brilliant Hadley Freeman has pointed out, this is pretty bad news for people who named their children after the once great man... If you’re looking for something good to read while awaiting the release of the novel, I’d recommend reading that entire article from Hadley. And also the first Guardian review from Mark Lawson. He seems to have enjoyed it.

How can we have missed this intervention. Complete with fabulous typo.

It’s not just in London that indie bookshops are going for it. Here’s a sale in waiting for Paradox Books in Auckland, New Zealand.

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Shami Chakrabarti: "Mockingbird is the book that taught me that human rights can’t just live in the courtroom"

“This was the book that taught me that human rights can’t just live in the courtroom, they have to live in the community. And you can’t separate justice from racial justice and class justice – and it’s all in that book!” said Shami Chakrabarti, from Liberty. “Whatever happens with Watchman, they can’t take that away from me!”, she added.

“If Atticus got older and became racist, and if Scout changed … nothing can detract from this beautiful morality tale that moved so many people and moved me. And life is complex. Frankly, Mockingbird was written in a word of Apartheid and segregation – and maybe we’re ready for a more complex novel now”, she said. “Nothing can take away from speech and knowledge. We are not afraid.”

Here’s our conversation with Shami:

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While we wait, a quick recap on what we know so far.

Harper Lee herself has described the novel in a statement as “a pretty decent effort”. So that’s good news.

But we’ve also seen the first chapter. We know the first sentence:
We also know the first sentence: “ Since Atlanta, she had looked out the dining-car window with a delight almost physical.”

We already have 3,665 other words to go on too. And, they weren’t bad, were they?

In fact, I’d say they were rather good. Better than I’d expected. When I read them on Friday I pretty quickly had to confront my own cynicism. I realise I’d been expecting to be disappointed. That for reasons I now can’t quite fathom I’d expected the author of To Kill A Mockingbird to produce something flat and dull. Instead, it was a chapter packed with gems, the kind of shiny, small hard delights that have kept people coming back to TKAMB for all these years. It’s aphorisms ahoy:

Although it was four hours away, she could hear her aunt’s sniff of disapproval.

In fact, he read himself straight out of the nineteenth century. He affected an Inverness cape and wore jackboots he had a blacksmith make up from his own design. Cousin Joshua was frustrated by the authorities when he fired upon the president of the University, who in his opinion was little more than a sewage disposal expert. This was no doubt true, but an idle excuse for assault with a deadly weapon.

The poetry was so ahead of its time no one has deciphered it yet.”

She was the sort of person who, when confronted with an easy way out, always took the hard way.”

Thank you, yes, I’ll have some of that. As I say, I’m rather pleasantly excited. If the rest of the book is as good as that opening, it’ll do me.

Well, I have to say this is all very good fun so far. It’s even exciting. Kudos to all the staff in this shop who are running around like crazy, making sure everything works and everyone gets popcorn:


The film of To Kill A Mockingbird is currently showing on two separate screens. I’d say there are about 250 people watching. Not bad for an old film on a Monday night.

I’m stashed away in a spare room deep in the shop and behind one of the cinema screens and I can hear Gregory Peck’s sonorous tones vibrating through the wall... I’ve filed from worse places!

Harper Lee tree:

Diane Abbott: "It makes Atticus more of a hero when you know that to he was caught up with some of the social attitudes of the time”

The Labour MP, who read To Kill a Mockingbird as a teenager, is staying up until midnight to get her copy of Watchman and start reading it. She said it isn’t surprising that Atticus, as has been revealed, is a “more complex character” in it than in the original book. “It doesn’t take away feom the heroism of Atticus.”

She doesn’t think this will change people’s perceptions of Atticus: “No, people are very complex. In a way, it makes Atticus more praiseworthy, and more of a hero, when you know that to an extent he was caught up with some of the social attitudes of the time.”

Here’s the Labour MP talking to us:

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It’s hotter than a Southern swamp up on the third floor of this shop - but there was a big crowd up there - standing room only - listening to Shami Chakrabarti and Diane Abbott.

Chakrabarti named To Kill A Mockingbird as one of her formative influences. Indeed, she said: “Without Mockingbird there would be no Shami Chakrabarti,” she said, “and quite a few people would be happy about that...”

After that Diane Abbott spent a few minutes talking about Boris’s water-cannons and making a pitch for doing his job, and I started to worry that the discussion would end up nowhere. Luckily, a member of the audience shot in with a brilliant question. “What would you have done to defend the case in To Kill A Mockingbird?” he asked Chakrabarti.

She was briefly floored. The man in the audience told her a lawyer had asked him this was the question to ask, and she started joking about everyone hating lawyers until they need them and setting off on a new tangent about the uses of the profession... But her questioner wasn’t having any of it. He told her she was answering like a politician, “which is to say, not answering at all”.
It was pretty fascinating to see someone used to duelling with some of the meanest polticians in the land lost for words - although she salvaged the situation by resorting to frank honesty. “I’m not sure I could defend it any better,” she said in the end. “The problems of the books and the story is that he raised the most eloquent defence and still didn’t win.” She also pointed out that she is “a recovering lawyer”.

Abbott then made the smart point that the outcome in To Kill A Mockingbird wasn’t about the ability of the lawyer - it was the social context. Maybe no one could have won that case...

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There’s plenty going on here in Waterstones Piccadilly before midnight when people can finally get hold of the books. In a few minutes, I’m going to see a panel discussion with Shami Chakrabarti from Liberty and Labour MP Diane Abbott. They’re slated to talk about the issues of “racism, human rights and equality explored in To Kill A Mockingbird” . Should be particularly interesting given the news that Atticus seems to express some pretty bracing views in Go Set A Watchman.
I’ll report on anything of interest that emerges. After that, there’s a viewing of the film and then: the big event. The most anticipated novel since the final Harry Potter is going to land. Although there are so many copies here in Waterstones Piccadilly already, I’ll see if I can’t even start reading a little early...
... No one’s going to mind are they?

There are also quite a few books here... And people taking pictures of people taking pictures of them.

Hello! Sam here, I’ve just arrived in Waterstones Piccadilly and there’s already a queue. This is Ashleigh Jayne, a big fan of the original novel, as you might expect... And looking likely to be one of the very first people in the UK to get hold of Go Set A Watchman.

Updated

Here’s a lovely response to a Mockingbird quote from reader bigalicev:

Photopolymer and etching. Jig saw of memories

More stories from readers about what To Kill a Mockingbird means to them here.

Updated

If you ever wondered what a mockingbird looked like:

Is this a form of damage limitation? (Bentley being the governor of Alabama, whose most powerful ambassador, Atticus Finch, could be seen to have taken a bit of a kicking from GSaW)

It can only be a matter of time till the disillusioned masses start changing their name by deedpoll:

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Here’s our own Hadley Freeman on the subject of “those” embargo-busting reviews...

Here’s the beautiful audio of Reese Witherspoon reading the opening chapter:

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"Control freakery" is putting it mildly

As control-freakery goes the GSaW launch takes takes some beating. Here are the instructions from its Australian publisher:

Fairfax have had all social posts pre-approved.... it’s important to avoid wording around ‘new’ or ‘second book’, so Fairfax are running with variations on the below:

· ‘much anticipated book’

· ‘highly anticipated book’

· ‘newly discovered book’

· ‘recently discovered book’

· ‘book’

· ‘novel’

· ‘long lost novel’

· ‘long lost book’

Updated

We’ve just had this from the Wardini bookshop in New Zealand’s Hawk’s Bay. Now ‘fess up guys. Are you really saying you haven’t had a peek inside the boxes?

Wardini
Go Set a Watchman boxes Photograph: PR

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Here are some Harper Lee pictures we’ve never seen before. Could that dress - Spoiler alert! - have inspired a key scene in Go Set a Watcham ...

harper lee pix
Click here to see the pictures

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Adelaide’s Readebook is also putting a good night’s sleep first:

adelaide
Go Set a Watchman

Melbourne’s Mary Martin bookshop is playing it cool:

Mary Martin bookshop

Here’s a challenge from Sydney’s Dymocks books:

So, the first copies of Go Set a Watchman are finally on sale in Australia.

Here’s Jason Steger, literary editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, discussing the first chapter:

Click on this picture and the video will start playing.

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Welcome! And a recap

After weeks of controversy and feverish speculation the great day has arrived for Harper Lee’s long-lost novel. Now’s your chance to find out what the world makes of the rest of Go Set a Watchman as it rolls out across the globe, starting at 9am Australian time (midnight 13 July BST).

Our own Sam Jordison will be among the queues waiting to snap up the first copies from London bookshops. He’ll be giving a chapter by chapter reading through the night, and will also write a running review in our very Twitter discussion, which you can join at any point in the next couple of weeks, as soon as you start reading.

Just in case you’ve spent the last few weeks in a sealed room, here’s some background on the biggest literary launch in living memory.

When the existence of the novel was revealed back in February it brought both the fans and the conspiracy theorists out in force.

User avatar for Hol48

i really can't decide whether I'm excited or nervous about this. Loved TKAM, but there is a certain power in it being a complete standalone and her only published novel.

User avatar for Sara Farrens Deutsch

Harper Lee didn't announce she would be releasing a sequel to TKAM. Publicists announced this. Miss Nelle is deaf, almost completely blind and has suffered a series of strokes and now resides in an assisted care facility (read Nursing Home). The reclusive, intensely private woman is now having a book published because her protector, her sister Alice died in November and her new "protector/lawyer" just happened to discover the existence of the novel 3 months ago and, PRESTO, we have the publisher salivating at a summer release. What does Nelle really think? We don't know, all we hear are quotes the publisher is releasing.

The news raised some eyebrows in Lee’s home town, where the 89-year-old author now lives in an assisted care facility. Retired Methodist preacher, the Rev Thomas Butts, was among those who professed themselves “sceptical” about the circumstances surrounding publication of the novel.

A reveal of the different covers for the US and UK editions brought the analysts out, with designer Stuart Bache concluding “they are essentially the same brief with different outcomes. Simply put, they are aimed at those who love (and those who have heard of) To Kill a Mockingbird.” It also inspired a raft of alternatives from our readers.

Go Set a Watchman covers
Go Set a Watchman covers Photograph: PR

In April the state of Alabama closed an investigation into allegations of “elder abuse”, following suggestions that Lee might not have been capable of agreeing to publication.

But controversy flared up again earlier this month with the revelation that the manuscript of Go Set a Watchman may have been discovered two years earlier than Lee’s lawyer and publishers had stated.

With the first reviews came the shock revelation that the beloved Finch family patriarch Atticus was a racist.

Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch, Mary Badham as Jean Louise 'Scout' Finch and Phillip Alford as Jeremy 'Jem' Finch
Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch, Mary Badham as Jean Louise ‘Scout’ Finch and Phillip Alford as Jeremy ‘Jem’ Finch Photograph: Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images

To Kill a Mockingbird fans were duly horrified:

Updated

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