Friday 17 November 2017

To Kill a Mockingbird- Book Review

What story is the best story?

 If you are reading a story and you feel like you are reading a story, it isn’t worth your time.

And when a story gives you the feel that the characters are talking  to you like bosom buddies with the unwavering trust in you- the trust that you would understand them, the trust that you would listen to them without judging them, it is the story we all want to get into, isn’t it?

I dare say this after reading “To kill a mockingbird”. This novel is worth your time, energy and many more rereads.
I regret for not having read it earlier. I should have read it a decade ago.

The best thing about this novel is that the writer doesn’t interfere with the flow of the characters. She lets them live their own lives, act their own ways, love in their own genuine manners and fight them their own battles. She doesn’t get into the patronizing philosophical explanations of events a writer is prone to fall for.

She doesn’t tell. She shows.

This is the story of the brave heart, humane lawyer (yes, a rare species) Atticus Finch and his two little kids- Jem, a boy in his mid-teen age who frets when his sister behaves like a girl and Scout who is  3 year younger to Jem with the keen eye for everything around her and enough sensitivity and courage to differentiate right from wrong.

Atticus is a white lawyer. I am using this term just for the sake of showing the racism in the novel, otherwise, Atticus wouldn’t like to be called as a white. He fights for a nigger, Tom Robbinson, who has been accused of raping a white girl Mayella Ewells, the daughter of an extreme racist Bob Ewells. Tom hasn’t raped Mayella and Atticus knew it.

 So he decides to deffend the case for Tom when nobody dares to accept it in the white dominant area- Maycomb.

Atticus loses the trial as it was an inevitable verdict just because Tom was a black and the so called victim girl was a white.  Later Tom is to be killed by the police while attempting to escape the prison (another routine fate of a black convict). When we all see this through the eyes of Scout, the narrator, we know how the world looks through the innocent eyes that haven’t yet been misted with class, colour, creed or religion.

Once Scout asks Jem a question and we feel as if she has exposed the hypocrisy of whole humanity.
“ ....Jem, how can you hate Hitler so bad and then turn around and be ugly about the folks right at home?”
She is referring to Miss Gates. Miss Gates teaches history at Scout’s school. She shows her fury in the class against Hitler who is shaming humanity by killing Jews in all over Europe. She says in the class that there should be equal rights for all and special privilege to none.
The same Miss Gates talks with her neighbour about teaching lessons to niggers, showing them their place and the rubbish like that.

Scout’s question makes Jem more disturbed as it reminds him the injustice on Tom and his own helplessness about the whole unjust system.

So this novel shows us the clear picture of racism in 1930’s America while giving us insights into the ideal parenting that Atticus epitomizes and throws light on many issues that were taboo in the early 20th century.

“ To Kill a Mockingbird” is such beautiful work of art  that I want to shout at every person i see –“go read this novel right now, do hell with your other important work”. 

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