An American classic. I've now read it three times with great pleasure. Several media polls both sides of the Atlantic have pronounced it Best Novel of the Twentieth Century. I won't argue. It's certainly a book everyone should know. Some have called TKAM a "Southern Gothic Bildungsroman". That's probably true too. Anyway, if you haven't read it, please make it your next book!

Set in small town Alabama during the Great Depression of the 1930s, TKAM is inevitably a novel about the evil of racism. Even so, it has been criticized for giving too little attention to the black characters in the story. True, they are not prominent, but the story is narrated in the first person by a young white girl, the tomboyish prepubescent Scout Finch. So it remains true to the narrator's perspective. There are strong echoes of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, not least in the childish perception of the reclusive bogeyman neighbour, Boo Radley, and Scout's enlightenment as to his true nature.

But Scout is not the central character. That role falls to her father, the widowed middle-aged lawyer, Atticus Finch. He defends a black man, Tom Robinson, against a charge of raping a young white woman, Mayella Ewell. Mayella belongs to a family at the very bottom of white Maycomb's social ladder. These days they would be called redneck trailer trash. But the word of any Ewell was still likely to trump the word of a black man, however reasonable.

Atticus Finch knows this, but perseveres with the defence anyway. It makes him a social pariah. Not that Atticus finds this troublesome. As virtually the only bookish person in town, he is always used to being an outsider, and is at peace with his lot. Atticus is the hub of the story, the model of how people ought to live with their neighbours. He treats all black people with the equal respect and esteem due to them as fellow humans. He is severe with his children on the rare occasions they are less than respectful to the Finches' black housekeeper, Calpurnia. At the same time, Atticus is often tolerant of his white bigot neighbours. He is never loudly sanctimonious or self-righteous, seeing in them not so much moral deficiency as paucity of understanding.

In short, Atticus Finch is a calm, mild mannered paragon, softly spoken but fearless, but not insufferably virtuous. He displays a deep loyalty to truth as his core moral value. He knows racism is wrong, and that he cannot compromise this belief, no matter what it costs. You have to play the ball as it lies, even if it's sitting on a landmine. It's a long time since I've seen the movie of TKAM, but Gregory Peck was surely well cast as the hero Finch. It's not a John Wayne or Clint Eastwood role (not that either was under consideration).

Atticus Finch is my kind of hero. I feel identity with him, even if I lack the need in RL to show the kind of courage he displays. Just as well!


Folio Society edition.