To kill a mockingbird

Tuesday

October 11, 2022

Has the American novel abandoned God?

I have always thought “Call me Ishmael” to be a rather camp introduction to a novel. Given the line’s conspiratorial intimacy, I have long imagined it whispered by a drag queen in a dive bar at 3 a.m. This, however, is the fault of my own unseriousness. The resonance of the name Ishmael — Abraham’s illegitimate son by Hagar who is destined to wander the desert — remains the opening example of one of the clearest, cleverest and most consistent of themes in Herman Melville’s magnum opus Moby-Dick, namely, the quest for God. Religion runs through Moby-Dick. We might almost say that the Bible haunts it. There are the names, mostly of Biblical characters, and even the direct invocation of prophets: Ezekiel, Elijah and, of course, the ur-whale wrestler, Jonah.

Sunday

October 28, 2018

Will Lloyd

To Kill a Mockingbird would probably not find a publisher in the age of #MeToo

On Tuesday, after a six-month long poll in which four million Americans voted, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird was voted the US’s best-loved novel. Mockingbird is so often at the summit of such polls or described as a book ‘every adult should read before they die’ that another win is no surprise. Lee, who stopped writing fiction and giving interviews almost as soon as the novel became a phenomenon, struggled for the rest of her life with the scale of its success. First published in 1960, as the civil rights movement hit its stride, Lee’s anti-racist novel has been handcuffed to liberalism for the last 50 years. An uncharitable reading of Mockingbird would see it as a childishly progressive fantasy.