Sequels

How do you follow a classic?

How many times, when you get to the end of a book that has drawn you in, hook line and sinker, do you want to know more?

The classic question is, what happens next?

It’s easy when you know the author has written a series, you get your fix from the next book and then the next and when you finally reach the end of the last book, most questions have already been answered: if you’re in luck, the author has left the characters in a good place where you can say goodbye. I’m sure I’m not the only one who shed a tear at the end of the ‘Harry Potter‘ series but J. K. Rowling tells us what the future holds for Harry, Ron and Hemione and we can let them go.

There are some famous sequels:

1. Jean Rhys’ ‘Wide Sargasso Sea‘, a companion novel to ‘Jane Eyre’, written from the perspective of Bertha Rochester, the infamous first wife.
2.  ‘Bridget Jones’ Diary‘ is widely regarded as a modern re-telling of ‘Pride and Prejudice’ and then we had ‘Death Comes to Pemberley‘ by Austen fan and critically acclaimed author P. D. James, a sequel to the aforementioned classic.
3. ‘Scarlett‘, by Alexandra Ripley, picked up where Margaret Mitchell left off in ‘Gone with the Wind’.
4. Gregory Maguire’s ‘Wicked‘, a sequel to ‘The Wizard of Oz’, became a hugely successful, Tony award winning musical as well as a book.
5. and ‘The Hours‘ by Michael Cunningham followed on from Virginia Woolf’s ‘Mrs Dalloway’ and became an Oscar nominated film starring Nicole Kidman.

Super-fans write a whole new genre called Fan Fiction, the most famous being the ‘Twilight‘ series. Here’s one commentator’s take on it:

“Each book in the series was inspired by and loosely based on a different literary classic: Twilight on Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, New Moon on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Eclipse on Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, and Breaking Dawn on a second Shakespeare play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

I found myself with a whole day on my own on New Year’s Eve and decided to treat myself to a good book. Nothing new there you might say but this time I decided to read a book I’d been putting off for ages, I read Harper Lee’s ‘Go Set A Watchman’. Why had I put it off?

• Harper Lee herself described it as “a pretty decent effort”

• ‘The Guardian’ calls it “a literary curiosity and a fascinating illustration of the mysterious pathways of the creative imagination.”

• ‘The Independent’ says “It is not a finely written story – this reads as a ‘good’ first draft which Lee has refused to rework.”

• A ‘New York Times’ reviewer states “Although “Go Set a Watchman” sporadically generates the literary force that has buoyed “To Kill a Mockingbird” for over half a century, the new novel is not nearly as gripping as the courtroom drama and coming-of-age story it eventually became.”

• ‘The Washington Post’ sums it up “Perhaps the best thing about this book is that it gives us a way to look at history from a great distance.”

I’m not surprised there are mixed reviews out there. It’s one thing when other authors write sequels but when the author themselves does it? What do we think? Should they have just left the original to speak for itself? How do you improve on a classic? What I did discover is that this book isn’t actually a sequel, it is the initial draft of ‘To Kill A Mockingbird‘ that the publishers sent back and asked Lee to write the story from the perspective of a young Jean Louise, hence Scout is born and the rest is history. It feels like a sequel because Scout is now an adult, returning to her home town and seeing it and its inhabitants as adults and not with the rose tinted glasses of childhood.

So what did I think of it? I’m not a literary person, I don’t profess to be a critic, I’m just a passionate reader with an eternally optimistic view on life, although I try to be more Lizzy Bennet than Jane Bennet. I am determined to see the best in life and in people, I want to find good things in books and focus on positives rather than picking out the negatives so forgive me if I share what struck me with the book rather than picking it apart.

I loved the language: when Scout says “although she was a respectable driver, she hated to operate anything more complicated than a safety pin” how can you not chuckle?

Working in a school, I know the frustration when Lee sums up the sad state of some educators when she has a professor say “you may write until doomsday for all I care, but if your answers do not coincide with my answers they are wrong.” This is not a reflection of the teaching staff I work with, rather it is a frustration with the UK education/examining system.

As a Methodist, I connected to the words “Herbert Jemson was a Methodist of the whole cloth: he was notoriously short on theology and a mile long on good works.”  and I am hoping my Methodist friends don’t take offence!

 

This is also a coming of age novel, Scout becomes Jean Louise, her childhood nickname is only one thing she leaves behind. In today’s world where we are re-evaluating childhood and identity and in particular gender identity, Lee has us experience what all girls go through, that moment when we are made to realise we are different to boys, when menstruation begins. Before then, we are all children, almost genderless, playing the same games and doing the same things. Scout’s experiences of “the curse” striking in the 1950s are no different to mine in the 1970s.

I am a feminist, I don’t believe that having periods stops girls and women from being capable of anything but I don’t always feel that when my kidneys hurt, when my stomach feels bloated and swollen, when I always know where the nearest toilet is and when I always have to have a handbag with me as a recepticle for sanitary products and over the counter painkillers. So I get Scout’s frustration when she makes the choice to sit out of games. I get her anger and resentment. Thankfully, what is available to girls now is much more sophisticated and my daughter does not have to resort to being “indisposed” every month.

Is Lee prophetic when she writes “The only thing I am afraid of about this country is that its government will someday become so monstrous that the smallest person in it will be trampled under foot, and then it wouldn’t be worth living in.”

She also has Atticus define what being a Democrat is (the political party in the US, not someone who believes in democracy, although you’d like to hope the two meet). Atticus says he is “a sort of Jeffersonian Democrat…Jefferson believed full citizenship was a privilege to be earned by each man…a man couldn’t vote simply because he was a man…” Lee has us question who should have the vote. Jean Louise is horried with her father’s attitide towards black people when she shouts at him “I’ve never in my life see you give that insolent, back-of-the-hand treatment half the white people down here give Negroes…yet you put out your hand in front of them as a people and say, ‘stop here. This is as far as you can go!’ You deny them hope.” This made my skin crawl.

Lee has Atticus’ brother, Dr Finch tell Scout “You’re colour blind, Jean Louise…you always have been, you always will be.” I remember making my son watch To Kill A Mockingbird (he was probably about 11 or 12) at the time). He didn’t want to, it was in black and white, it was slow and he didn’t get what it was about from the blub on the DVD cover. Afterwards, I asked him what he thought and he commented on many aspects of the film and agreed that it had been worth watching. What staggered me was his total exclusion of the race element of the film and when I asked him about it, he asked why the colour of people’s skin mattered, that wasn’t important. I was shell-shocked to say the least, the racism had totally passed him by, he thought people were just mean to other people because some people just behaved like that. He had lived in Hong Kong since the age of four, a white boy amongst a mainly Chinese population and we had a Filipana living in our house so colour was all around him.

Lee puts it like this:

“Had she insight, could she have pierced the barriers of her highly selective, insular world, she may have discovered that all her life she had been with a visual defect which had gone unnoticed and neglected by herslef and by those closest to her: she was born color blind.”

My son is almost 21 and, like Scout, has had to grow up and see the world for how it is, prejudiced.

I can’t begin to truly address the issues of race here, I am a middle class, middle aged white British woman living in the south of England. My reality and experience has been so different to that which many people of colour are experiencing right now in the US, particularly as Trump gives validation to the horrors of hatred and prejudice, but that doesn’t mean I am without compassion and righteous anger. Forgive me if my words have offended, have been misguided or patronising or just mixed up, I try on a daily basis to be colour blind, to treat everyone as equals and am ashamed each day when I fail. We all do. The important thing is that we pick ourselves up and try again and never stop. Scout keeps questioning and we must do the same.