Posted on June 30, 2010 by Yare A

Some books so fluidly go past the tales they contain that the characters and setting almost become accompanying the universal themes they express without contrivance. Such a novel exists in Harper Lee’s masterful 1960 book, among the most revered pieces of fiction this country has ever produced. Set in rural, Depression-era Alabama, it’s a classic coming-of-age tale about a intelligent nine-year old tomboy called Scout. What she experiences is palpable in the bitter racism circling the persecution of Tom Robinson, a black man unjustly accused of raping Mayella, the abused white daughter of an unremorseful bigot, Bob Ewell. Defending Tom in court is Atticus Finch, Scout’s father and the moral ambit of the story.

The chronicle moves toward a deepening exploration of the balking conflict between tolerance and ignorance and how the preexisting environment of hatred and distrust makes guiltless people guilty by pure circumstance. Scout personifies these themes within her own journey toward womanhood and her questions of what society requires of her. Through the efforts of Tom and the town’s outcast, Boo Radley, and primarily through her father’s example, Scout realises how natural goodness can exist even in the most awful circumstances. Probably because the chronicle is semi-autobiographical, Lee is able to vividly capture the rural south and the general mindset during the Depression with mesmerising accuracy. Yet for all that, the novel’s lasting legacy has more to do with Lee’s especial lierary gift in bringing a true universality to her themes.

Additional characters weave in and out of the tale – including Dill, Scout’s wannabe boyfriend and the Truman Capote doppelganger – and each plays a key part in forming the novel’s core conflicts. I have to say that the author’s especial literary strengths come to the fore in her empathetic characterisations of the developing relationships between these characters, for instance, Scout and her father Atticus, Scout and her brother Jem, the children and Boo. Nothing appears extraneous in the story Lee tells, no small feat for a 336-page novel. She adds intense emotion to her prose, especially in depicting the uncontrollable craze created by racial hatred and false accusations, for example, in the lynch mob scene before the trial and in the revengeful attack on the children. The timing of the book’s original 1960 publishing turned out to be discerning, as the Civil Rights movement was just becoming national in scope thanks to the efforts of Martin Luther King and his brethren