You can’t help but feel that Brilliant Books in Michigan is setting a dangerous precedent. This previously obscure independent bookstore based in Traverse City is offering refunds to customers who have bought Harper Lee’s rediscovered first novel Go Set a Watchman. Instead of a “nice summer novel”, these naive punters have apparently been saddled with an “academic” curiosity. If it is not what lovers of To Kill a Mockingbird expected, declares proprietor Peter Makin, they should have their money back.
Imagine if this set the pattern for all our cultural disappointments. Last weekend I was relishing the prospect of the Barbara Hepworth exhibition at Tate Britain, but found that works intended to bask in natural light were huddled in an artificially lit basement, and objects that the sculptor had intended to be touched were connected to alarms to prevent this. I would like my entrance fee back please! This week I found the new, exciting Mission Impossible film unexcitingly almost indistinguishable from the previous ones. Will either the studio or the cinema reimburse me? Whenever I have gone to the theatre to find a Shakespeare comedy unfunny, or a tragedy unmoving, should I have made a return trip to the box office for repayment?
It is odd that any of Makin’s customers should feel cheated. Purchasers entirely ignorant of the origins of Harper Lee’s “new” novel – written before To Kill a Mockingbird and locked away in a box for more than half a century – must have been locked away themselves. The book hardly masquerades as a freshly minted sequel, and the book jacket promises are no more unrealistic than the average publisher’s puff. Indeed, the blurb writer makes a point of characterising the novel as an “essential companion” to To Kill a Mockingbird – which it is. The Brilliant Books website announces that Go Set a Watchman is “a first draft that was originally, and rightfully, rejected”. But this is wrong. It is not some botched or unfulfilled early version of To Kill a Mockingbird – it is an entirely different novel. Though in need of some polishing, it is a completed work of fiction.
You feel that the money back offer is entangled with the way in which Lee’s first attempt at fiction contradicts the novel that so many have come to love. Some readers have recoiled from a work in which Atticus Finch, the noble anti-racist of the book that Lee wrote next, is depicted as a bigot and moral coward. (There have also been some who have rather triumphed in the fact, as Lee’s earlier version reveals the “truth” behind white liberalism.)
Every novel reader knows what it is like to purchase a book by a novelist whose work one has already relished – and then be disappointed. Disappointment of expectations is part of what novel reading is about. Some fans of Kazuo Ishiguro – a novelist who loves to thwart expectations – were disappointed to find that there were goblins and a dragon in his most recent novel. This is not what I was paying for! Many admirers of Edward St Aubyn’s harrowing autobiographical fiction were irked when he next gave them an elegantly silly satire on literary prize-giving. I was hoping for something else! It has always been thus. Jane Austen records that several of her family and friends were disappointed when, as a follow-up to scintillating Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, she gave them timid Fanny Price in Mansfield Park. Not what they wanted!
I have never visited Brilliant Books, but it must sell some books that are not really “brilliant”. Perhaps Mr Makin should explain this to customers who might otherwise be disappointed.
