If you were to ask me, what do I think of To Kill a Mockingbird, I would say that it is the best piece of fiction I have ever read and that I have a strong feeling that its going to be one hell of a time before I read another like it. It is a strong, yet gentle, lyrical and funny book about two children and how a single event changes their lives.
It would a criminal understatement to say that it is a coming-of-age novel. The three main protagonists, a little girl, Jean Louise 'Scout' Finch of nearly six, her brother, Jeremy 'Jem' Finch, nearly ten, and their friend, Charles 'Dill' Harris, a little boy of seven, are only two years older when the book ends. Hardly a coming-of-age. And yet, in a sense, it is.
Scout is an intelligent, observant young six year old, totally one of the boys, and with a quick little temper of her own.
Jem is the quintessential ten year old, intelligent, imaginative and stubborn, who, in Scout's words, ''loves honour more than his head.''
Dill is an inveterate tale spinner, and yet you cannot find it in you to tell him off when he says that he 'ate in the dining car all alone, paid the car guard himself and....' when all he did was come by train from Meridian to Maycomb, which is not that far off, as it is. He has an overactive imagination, but a good-hearted boy under all that .
The three live in Maycomb County, a town no different from hundreds of other small towns, anywhere in the Southern United States. There is the absolutely lovable Miss Maudie Atkinson, a call-a-spade-a-spade type, who declares, when her house burns down that she is ''thanking God that that old mausoleum finally burnt down, so I can get me a smaller one.''
There is the town gossip, Miss Stephanie. All the town gossip is ''three quarters nigger talk and one quarter Stephanie'' in Maudie Atkinson's words.
The story begins with Scout, Jem and Dill, who they meet that summer, filled with a burning curiosity to see Boo Radley, a mysterious character who lives in the ‘Radley Place’, and never comes out. Town legend has it that he is mad, and anything amiss anywhere in the town is quickly attributed to ‘him’. Children in school don’t eat the pecans that fall from a tree in the Radley Place which shares its compound with the school, because people say he ‘pizened them to kill the children’.
Scout, Jem and Dill try every which way to lure Boo out of his house, from poking a carefully written message into a window using a fishing pole, to sneaking up and trying to get in the Radley house at night.
Dill especially, is obsessed with Boo. He spends all day with his arms around the lamppost at the street corner from the Radley house, dreamily looking at the house and fantasizing about who Boo may be and how to get him out of there.
Then suddenly this small, self-satisfied town is shaken out of its idyll, when a Negro is accused of raping a white woman. You must remember, while reading the book, that in 1935, when the book is set, segregation in America was still very much segregation.
A Negro who is accused of a crime against a white, is always guilty of it, regardless of the truth.
Atticus Finch, however, decides to take up Tom, the negro’s defence.
Atticus Finch is Sout and Jem’s dad. Their mother died when they were very young.
Atticus is a middle aged , level headed lawyer, with a gentle wit. He is by nature a thinker, the most broadminded person in town. He is also an innately courteous man, the kind that we will never see because it died out in the fifties.
He treats his children as adults and answers their every question with careful thought. He is the character I liked best in the story.
He takes up the case because he says that in the context, it does not really matter whether the case is won or lost, the important thing was to put up a fight.
I will not reveal the end, you should go read the book.
Funnily though, the end is not quite as important as the events that led up to it.
To all of you who decide to read the book, I say go buy it. Read it from a library if you like, but then go buy the book. It is worth everything you pay for it, and for me, it was worth even more.
