To Kill a Mockingbird still shines a sharp light on southern society, but its power comes as much from its narrative mastery as its understanding of racism

It’s easy to get distracted from To Kill a Mockingbird by the excitement building about Go Set a Watchman and the deepening mystery of its discovery. And it’s hard to think about this great southern novel simply as a work of art, so soon after the horror at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal church, and while black churches still burn across the American south.

To Kill a Mockingbird is an important social document for all sorts of reasons: its context matters. But for now at least, I’m keen to focus on the novel itself.

Let’s perform a quick thought experiment. How will To Kill a Mockingbird be viewed a few generations down the line? Will it still be read? And if so, why?

Looking back at To Kill a Mockingbird, and forward to Go Set a Watchman Read more

It will explain a great deal about a certain society, but so too will history books and documentary footage. If the novel endures – and surely it must – it will be for other reasons. Similarly, future generations may find the current media storm interesting, but only in relation to the novel itself. The hype over Go Set a Watchman will be a scholarly footnote. Possibly, Go Set a Watchman itself will be a footnote. We’ll see about that soon. Either way, my point is that the text of Mockingbird is a bedrock that will endure long after the tide of history has swept aside most of our current concerns.

All those millions of new readers who fall for To Kill a Mockingbird every decade don’t just do so because it’s so famous already, or for the moral and societal lessons they pick up from Atticus Finch and the tragedy of Tom Robinson. Those are part of the appeal – but they aren’t what first snags the reader.

What matters first, of course, is this:

When he was nearly thirteen my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow. When it healed, and Jem’s fears of never being able to play football were assuaged, he was seldom self-conscious about his injury. His left arm was somewhat shorter than his right; when he stood or walked, the back of his hand was a right-angles to his body, his thumb parallel to his thigh. He couldn’t have cared less, so long as he could pass and punt. When enough years had gone by to enable us to look back on them, we sometimes discussed the events leading to his accident. I maintain that the Ewells started it all, but Jem, who was four years my senior, said it started long before that. He said it began the summer Dill came to us, when Dill first gave us the idea of making Boo Radley come out.

There are no particular fireworks in those opening paragraphs. That “somewhat “ and “I maintain” may give a fleeting impression of southern formality; more certainly, you get a feeling for the perspective of the narrator, of an adult walking again in a child’s shoes. Subconsciously, you might also register that this is a writer who knows about rhythm, especially thanks to the way she closes the first paragraph with the satisfying heaviness of “pass and punt” .

At this stage, Harper Lee’s prose is quiet and unassuming. But those first words do something special all the same. There might not be any explosions, but the fuses are set. How did Jem break his arm? What did the Ewells start? Who are the Ewells? Who is Dill? And who on earth – what on earth – is Boo Radley? What does it mean to make him “come out”?

There are mysteries to unravel – and so, you’re hooked. This is good old-fashioned storytelling: pure, maybe not simple, but certainly elemental. To Kill a Mockingbird taps into some of the longest-running themes in literature – fighting injustice, finding out about the world – and does it well. We read the book because to do so is a pleasure. When I started reading again, I was almost immediately lulled by Scout’s mint-julep voice. And once again I was bowled over by passages like this one:

Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired old town when I first knew it. In rainy weather the streets turned to red slop; grass grew on the sidewalks, the court-house sagged in the square. Somehow, it was hotter then; a black dog suffered on a summer’s day; bony mules hitched to Hoover carts flicked flies in the sheltering shade of the live oaks on the square. Men’s stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon, after their three o’clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum.

I highlighted that delicious paragraph last time we looked at the book in the Reading group. Back then I ascribed its success as much to magic as anything else. I noted the “technical prowess in the imagery (how perfectly all that sagging and wilting leads up to the teacakes)”. I also hit on the “the choice language (notice they are ‘ladies’, not women; look at the hiss and stick of the sibilance, and all those letter ‘g’s in the muddy second sentence)”. But at that stage, I decided it was an “alchemy of mood and voice” that makes the book so effective. This time around, something else stands out for me: the fact that it’s all so visual. All those images are so clear and strong. (Especially if you know that a Hoover cart is a converted automobile, pulled by mules.) Harper Lee makes us see through Scout’s eyes. She does it throughout the book. She even reminds us of it. Most famously, here:

I looked around. They were standing. All around us and in the balcony on the opposite wall, the Negroes were getting to their feet. Reverend Sykes’s voice was as distant as Judge Taylor’s. ‘Miss Jean Louise, stand up. Your father’s passin’.’

We’re there with Scout – but also watching her, looking out. It’s a key to the success of the storytelling, as well as a neat internal commentary on Atticus’s favoured philosophy of walking in someone else’s shoes. It’s the classic “show” rather than “tell” beloved of creative writing handbooks. It makes the world seem real and gives the story weight.

But there’s something else happening here too. This world seems all the more particular because it is seen through Scout’s eyes, and filtered through her memory. We’re getting a particular view, from a particular place, at a particular time. And it’s Scout’s powerful and individual vision that gives the book so much of its enduring power. We still read To Kill a Mockingbird because there’s nothing else like it, and nor can there be.

Paradoxically enough, it’s this unique world view that gives the novel such universal appeal. It’s what makes it resonate, and encourages us to dive right in, bringing our own concerns and baggage with us. Maybe future generations will look to the book for solutions to their own problems. But they’ll be there, first and foremost, because they like a good story.