To Kill A Mockingbird

Prior to this week, I had never read Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird. I must have missed it somehow in high school, though that's probably for the best. Outside of Hemingway and Crime and Punishment, there wasn't much I read in high school I enjoyed, and part of that has to be that I was being forced to read them*. Fortunately, someone left a copy sitting in the common area, and I took the opportunity.

I knew that some of the plot revolved around Atticus Finch's attempt to defend a black man on trial in a town in the American South, but I was surprised how far into the book I was before the trial began. For the first hundred pages, there was no direct mention of it. At most, we observe how the other kids at school have something new they believe can be used to taunt Scout and Jem. It works well, since it gave me the opportunity to get to know many of the major characters and the culture of the town under what would be considered normal circumstances, before the trial starts to exert pressure on everyone.

I quite liked the use of Scout as the point-of-view character. Since she's the youngest main character in the book, there's a lot she doesn't understand about the world, and so we see her frustration, which seems to be equal parts the ugly things she learns people are capable of, and the fact she can't see why people would do or say those things. Sometimes her elders attempt to explain things, and sometimes she's left to try and puzzle it through herself, if she can even decide how to ask what's troubling her. And sometimes the answers she receives aren't helpful, either because she can't quite grasp what they're saying, or because the answer itself isn't particularly good. Her older brother Jem seems to provide many of those sorts of answers, probably because he's struggling with the same realizations she is, and the years he has on her aren't sufficient to have figured everything out.

For a time, I though the fire that burned down Maude's house might have been intentional, simply because it seemed like the kind of thing Scout wouldn't pick up on, and none of the adults would have told her about. But I don't think Maude would have been as cheerful as she was if that was the case, so I decided it really was just an accident that happened because she was trying to keep her flowers warm in the snow.

I wonder about the comparison of Boo Radley with the mockingbird. Admittedly, I don't have as high an opinion of mockingbirds as people in the book. I think they're clever, since they imitate the calls of other birds to try and keep their territory as much to themselves as they can. Still, Boo's activities seem to provide considerable entertainment to the people of Maycomb, whether it's speculating about him, or the kids' games and attempts to lure him out of his house. For whatever his quirks, he seems to ultimately be a good person, and the adults largely leave him be Mockingbirds tend to nest in shrubs or trees where their nests can be well hidden (a cedar, for example), similar to how Boo stayed largely within his house (at least when the kids were out and about, clearly the adults of the town weren't too stunned by his emergence at the end).

* Another part might be I was too young to appreciate them, and still another is they weren't books I'd enjoy. I don't believe that I'd enjoy Jane Eyre more if I chose to read it now then I did in 12th grade.