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| A Classic Turn 50 novel |
Shoot all the blue jays you want… but remember, it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird’. When Harper Lee published her first and, as it turned out, only novel, all she expected was ‘a quick and merciful death at the hands of the reviewers’.
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Half a century and a pulitzer Prize later, to kill a Mokingbird is prehaps one of the best loved stories of modern time.
It was voted the ‘best novel of the 20th century’ by readers of Library Journal in 1999 and beat the Bible into second place as ‘the book every adult should read before they die’ (UK Librarians Poll, 2006).
That the book was an instant success—a record 88 weeks at the top the bestseller list—can be chalked up to the fact that it was the right book at the right time; a story of racial injustice published at the peak of the civil rights movement in America.
But this doesn’t explain its phenomenal popularity that has waxed rather than waned over the last 50 years. Translated into 40 languages, with 30 million copies sold, it continues to be read and cherished generation after generation.
All across the world.
‘I enjoyed the fact that we see things through a child’s eye …
There is… an air of innocence and a feeling of hope overall,’ says Anita who lives in UK. Perhaps this is because in spite of its main plot, the novel is not just about racism but the universal themes of injustice and prejudice and the (un)common human values of conurage, compassion and tolerance.
If tom robinson, punished for the colour of his skin, is the eponymous moking bird of the story, so too is Boo Radley; convicted and sentenced without the benefit of a trial by the harsh rules of a rigid society.
Race riots my be a thing of the past (or perhaps not) but the unthinking cruelty of one human being towards another is, unfortunately, something we can all relate to.
According to Huma Yusuf, journalist and self-confessed fiction fanatic, ‘few characters in fiction have been as captivating as Boo Radley.
The fact that (he) doesn’t present himself until the end of the novel and is, in the meantime, a construction of all the other characters in the books imaginations (as well as the readers) is an amazing literary device.
What I learnt from Boo Radley is that societies are cruel, that individuals are helpless in the face of social networks and public perception and that who you are is less important than what everyone thinks of you.’
And then there are the many facets of courage. From Mrs Dubose and her steely resolve to face death ‘beholden to nothing and nobody ‘to Atticus’ moral stand in taking up a lost cause—the novel is a lesson in how courage is not a man with a gun: ‘it’s when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.’
Last but not least, it is a story about compassion and how you ‘never really know a man until you stand in his shoes and walk around in them.’
In this age of blind hatred, there can hardly be a more relevant theme or a more inspiring message; perhaps this is why To Kill a Mockingbird
Remains the world’s favourit book.