To Kill a Mockingbird - book review

 

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

To Kill a Mockingbird review

The perfect vacation read. Having never read it, I picked it up and read the whole thing in less than a week – rare for me!

Set in the 1930s, told from the perspective of a lawyer’s prepubescent daughter, Harper Lee’s vivid writing grips. The reader can easily visualize the porches, the people, and the town. Here are some themes I discerned:

Individual dignity
Whether it was the hermit next door they liked to mock, or the racism against the blacks painfully depicted, Atticus Finch was the foil, persuading us to respect the dignity of any and every person. One way the author did this was to not tell the reader the race of key characters until far in, sometimes never. It became important to the plot to know, at some points, yet you didn’t know. A person’s race mattered to the town, and to the plot of the book. But it shouldn’t have. Another key example of individual dignity comes from the title. When Atticus gives his children air rifles for Christmas, he instructs them: “Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit ‘em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.” Their neighbor explains further, “Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird” (119). This is a metaphor for vulnerable people like hermits or minorities. The community COULD hurt them, but should leave them alone and let them sing their song.

Injustice
But what we see under the surface of the nice small town is people who DO want to hurt others. Teachers want to impose ideology without understanding for individual students. White trash want to put down blacks to feel better about themselves. (The “n” word is used liberally.) Good folks put down the white trash, and the African native needing civilization, to feel better about themselves. This all culminates in the accusation of rape against a black man on a backwoods white man’s daughter. Though all the evidence points to her propositioning him, the father charges the man with rape to escape the shame of it.

Incrementalism toward justice
Atticus was happy to lose his case, with the jury deliberating for hours instead of minutes, knowing the judge was on his side. That was progress. It meant there was at least one man on that jury who stuck up for the truth in the face of sheer prejudice, and that was a win. This would be unacceptable compromise today, from any political viewpoint. But it is a mature understanding of realistically changing society. It takes time and baby steps to get there.

Innocence of children?
One theme that bothered me at first was the refrain that children haven’t learned the sin of prejudice yet, so are more distressed by it. The book flirts with Rousseau’s idea of the tabula rasa: children are innocent; it is society that corrupts them. But I believe we can reject that, and also see that some societal sins like racism are corporate and learned. As a theological example, I became convinced of paedo-Communion when I read 1 Corinthians 11 in context: it was the adults who were slighting the poor during Communion, not the children. The grownups weren’t discerning the body by giving everyone an equal share. That wasn’t something the children would have even thought to do, yet THEY are excluded from the sacrament by most Christians, on the assumption that THEY can’t discern the body. Disregarding the poor or the young are learned, societal traits largely unknown to our children. This doesn’t mean they are innocent until society corrupts them. They have their own sinful nature, too. So it is with sinful patterns like racism.

A God’s-eye view
The hermit who lives next door, whom they never see, I believe represents God. He is distant and absent for the whole story. Talked about, wondered at, even mocked. But at the end we find out that he has been seeing the whole town drama play out from his window. He emerges to protect, and to bring justice. Even the sheriff realizes there was a higher law that he fulfilled. In front of the hermit and the principled lawyer he obliquely justifies the hermit’s actions. This is the refrain of the popular mystery novel: justice has been done outside the conventional standards. Is that okay? The implication is strongly, “Yes.” “A righteousness, apart from the law…” (Romans 3:21ff).

Conclusion
In our day, the woke have co-opted the civil rights movement to advance wickedness (the trans are the new afflicted minority) and injustice (“down with white privilege!”). This prompts the anti-woke to reject books like this as the seeds of liberalism. I reject this view entirely. It’s true the worldview of this book isn’t tethered much to God or a biblical worldview. We only get hints of that. But Atticus Finch fought a good fight. The judge was right to put him on the case, and lean on the jury to decide for righteousness. Finch was right that he was obligated to take the case, for his integrity’s sake.

When the woke exploit and corrupt ideals like racial justice for their own purposes, let us not throw out the ideal, but continue to stand for it in its pure form, as Atticus Finch did.

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