If George Clooney would have been a book, he would have been this one. Both he and To Kill a Mocking Bird have aged like wine.
Starting to read the novel, my first assumption was that I would not be able to get through the book because of the typicality of the accent Lee has put on paper. It came across as intimidating to a person for whom English is a second language and Alabama’s English incomprehensible.
But reading on, I realized that this typical portrayal of the language, the people, their motivations and presumptions of nonconformists transported me to a place of which I know nothing of except for a song (Sweet Home Alabama) and a polarizing anti-abortion law.
We see this world from the lens of little Scout, a non-conformist who, initially must have thought like all other children that the world is black and white. For a moment, it takes us back to our childhood and reminds us of how we viewed the world as a place of sunshine and rainbows, a place where God exists and justice is based on truth.
The novel is a huge canvas and every stroke of colour strikes you at so many different levels. In a book of 309 pages, there are innumerable things you can take from it. Racism still is the biggest and most apparent of all themes that the book covers. The way the book portrays racism strikes close to home because of the similarity it has with the Indian caste system. Racism, like casteism, exists at so many levels, starting from a tea party conversation going all the way up to the judiciary.
Just the way racism exists at so many levels, there is classism too. People’s status in the world of Lee’s novel is determined by the family they are born into and from the novel, it seems pretty clear that no one in this fictional world has been able to be bigger than their circumstances have let them be. There is also a theme of the sexual liberation of women and how women were supposed to be, in fact, still are expected to be objects for the fulfilment of sexual needs rather than being a human who has sexual needs of her own too.
This book makes readers take a step back to see themselves in each character only to realize that the world is far from the kind of dream it exists in children’s eyes. But, the hardest-hitting point, even if we don’t acknowledge it, is the ‘truth’. The truth is that we have, in some way or the other have contributed to either sustaining inequality and injustice. It is us, who have knowingly or unknowingly strangled the hopes and dreams we had about the world.
