To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee

I have been friends with this book for a long time. I won it, long ago, in Mr. F's class for a reading award or somesuch, and he bequeathed it to me with remarks that it was his favourite book. Which is slightly awkward, after all... favourite books are such intimate things. I don't quite know what my honest assessment of Mr. F is, because I didn't know him very well and was influenced by the malicious class atmosphere and petty gossip. Besides, he came after Ms. J., whom we admired so wholeheartedly that he was no rival. But judging by the repertoire of fiction that he really, really loved: LotR and Mockingbird amongst others - and tried to impress that love upon us (I don't know how many of us appreciated it), there were probably unsounded depths to his personality.

I have always admired Mockingbird, and upon rereading after many years my assessment is still the same: this book is so PERFECT. it does everything right. it's an essay about an important issue, and it has a heroine you can really love and grow up with. it's so easy-to-read, and not a single thing is out of place or amiss. There are books that are instructive, not preachy but designed to enlighten on a certain issue: The God of Small Things, or the Life of Pi, fall into this category. Singular of purpose and meticulously executed works of art. Then, there are books where the plot is a breathing ground for the main character: Anne of Green Gables and Harry Potter are novels of this type, with heroes/heroines you really learn to love. Mockingbird does both. You can be friends with Scout and Dill, and you come away moved and wiser by the events of the story.

I began Laurence's A Bird in the House just after closing this book. I was surprised to find the same erudite prose and child's eye view I found in Lee. I began thinking of "traditional" prose, like in Lee and Laurence and even Harry Potter, and Austen and Tolstoy, versus stylistically beautiful prose like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Pasternak and Ondaatje. Even Mark Haddon's Dog in Nightime falls under the stylistic category. And I think, masterpieces as Love in the Time of Cholera and The English Patient are, there is nothing like a traditional, "storytelling" story. I guess it's the equivalent of the debate between representational and non-representational art. As beautiful and moving and profound as abstract art is, there is nothing as comforting and easy to relate to as a really well-done realistic painting. I admire experimental fiction and art, and I think it's necessary that we seek out new means of expressing ourselves and to react to societal change, but for me, there is nothing quite like the classics. A really great work of art relies on more than style, of course. Nevertheless, I think it is more challenging to paint or write really well within classical constraints. Orwell, for instance, has not defied the "elements of style and grammar," but his prose is well-tuned, sound.

Lastly, I will have to track down some Truman Capote. I'm increasingly intrigued by the friendship between Harper Lee and Truman Capote, given that Lee seems to be influenced by Capote to pursue a writing career, that she "toiled for years" while he was successful and popular. Given that Capote seems to be the quintessential affable, social homosexual. And given that there are some nostalgic paragraphs in Mockingbird that make me think she must have loved him.