London: Fans of Harper Lee will be confronted by a very different side of fictional lawyer Atticus Finch, known as a courtroom moral hero, in Harper Lee’s forthcoming novel Go Set a Watchman.The book, reportedly written in the 1950s and later reworked on her editor's suggestion to become the famed To Kill a Mockingbird, sees Finch return, but this time as a bad tempered, elderly racist, rather than the calm and liberal rationalist exemplified by Gregory Peck’s performance in the 1962 film adaptation.
According to a review in the New York Times, Finch appears in Watchman as an elderly man who once attended Ku Klux Klan meetings. The revelation will shock fans of the celebrated writer who have been eagerly awaiting the new book as the literary event of the year.
Whereas the reworked novel is written from the point of of view of Atticus’s daughter, Scout, as a child, Watchman has her as an adult, trying to come to terms with the the more unpleasant aspects of her elderly father’s personality. “Do you want Negroes by the carload in our schools and churches and theaters? Do you want them in our world?” Finch asks a grown up Jean Louise, aka Scout.
