To Kill a Mockingbird

"Even though I know we’ve made great strides in America, and have come from the reality of Maycomb [the setting of the novel], we still suffer today from the lingering effects of the bigotry of that era. At the same time, it’s a lesson in standing tall in the face of tremendously hostile circumstances. The fact that justice may not always be served can be jarring. We all know Atticus [Finch, the narrator’s father] is the moral compass of the book. I think we need to follow that example and carry a sense of moral purpose. This conscience explains why progressives fight for the marginalised, the disenfranchised and the underdog. It’s because it’s the right thing to do."

"Atticus Finch is a great hero of mine and of any criminal defence lawyer. There he is defending the underdog in a case where it’s intensely unpopular to do that. The book touches on so many issues and deals with so many prejudices – prejudices towards the mentally ill, racial stuff. It’s a book that was way ahead of its time in many ways. It’s also a wonderfully written book – a joy to read. And the reason that the guy on trial tried to escape was because he was an innocent person who didn’t have faith in the legal system because the system was patently failing him. Yet they kill him anyway. Anyone who thinks the racial issues are past is simply deluded. We substitute one racial prejudice for the last. I’m not saying that we don’t make advances. I’ve run across far fewer Klansmen in Mississippi in recent years than I used to. But on the other hand, instead of picking quite so much on black people in the Deep South, we pick on Muslims. We have to have someone to hate because it suits the purposes of government. Well, I don’t think we’ll achieve utopia this week or next, but a problem with most of society is we’ve long since lost the notion of what we’re aiming for. We’ve lost the ability to dream. We don’t know what our ideal society is. We have our noses down, either to the grindstone or in the trough, to such an extent that we really don’t have any idea where we’re going. The purpose of the book I’ve just written is not to solve all of our problems, it’s merely to get people to recognise them so that we can have a debate about solving them. Will we excise bias from the world? Of course not. We need to recognise where bias comes from and do our best to counteract it. You look around the world and you see who’s most hated and you get between them and the ones doing the hating, on the principle that when hatred drives the forces of society it’s got to be wrong. Are we going to do away with all of those biases and hatred? No, of course not. But it’s our obligation to do what we can. Yeah, sure. It’s astounding to me who they come up with. I just can’t fathom how the Australians, who I think are basically such nice people, can hate Aboriginals so much. It’s amazing, isn’t it? Originally we founded it – it wasn’t just me, it was some other people as well – in 1999 to focus on the death penalty in the US. It was mainly to organise volunteers to come and work with us in the US because we were so underfunded. Then in 2002 I got involved in the Guantanamo Bay investigation, because what was going on in Guantanamo really pissed me off. Lately we’ve done a lot of drone work as well because what America is currently doing is, instead of banging people up in Guantanamo, they just kill them with Hellfire missiles in Pakistan’s border region. So those are really the three areas. Our focus, as I mentioned, is on looking for people who are truly hated and trying to stop the people doing the hating from going around killing them or banging them up without a fair trial. We focus primarily on what the US does, on the principle that until we get the US to stop executing people, we’re going to have a terrible time persuading Belarus. Just the other day, the president of that country said they wouldn’t abolish the death penalty until the Americans did. I think if we don’t get America to stand up for what it really should stand up for and what America is really all about, as long as we have people like George Bush and the vast majority of the Republican candidates for president going around saying that we should waterboard people and things like that, what hope is there for the world? So we focus on things that the US shouldn’t be doing."

"This is another standard that everybody read when they were 14. What I think it really shows is the myth, at least in white America, of the black man as sexual predator – which still exists. The defendant in the case, Tom Robinson, is essentially a cripple. The case, which we tend to forget, was about the rape of a poor white woman. It turns out she was probably raped by her own father. Most rape cases in the United States, for a very long period of time, were against black men. Something like eight out of 10 of those cases ended up in convictions. Quite often, castration was the punishment. In this case it’s critical to bring up the notion that permeated To Kill a Mockingbird of any black man being a potential sexual predator. As one court put it, any sexual encounter between a white woman and a black man had to be rape, because “no black man could assume that a white woman would consent to his lustful embraces”. We’ve come a long way from that, but I think that is really at the bottom of the case. Let’s not forget that for most of American history there was no such thing as rape of a black woman – especially black women who were owned by their masters. Part of the benefits of slave ownership was to take sexual advantage of your slaves. There was clearly a double standard. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter So the case is about racism , but it’s also about white sexual fear of the black man, and the failed effort of white America to stop intermixing. I think the notion of the scary black man still permeates the American justice system today. Some people are rethinking this book, saying it’s a racist novel, it’s patronising, et cetera. I don’t think To Kill a Mockingbird is one of the greatest pieces of literature ever. I think it’s been overrated over the years. But it is a very good window into the ingrained sexual fear that permeated at least the southern American justice system."

"It’s still a wonderful read. It’s dated in many ways; it’s extremely sentimental. But it’s beautifully done – you can’t take a thing away from it. We hope that the law is less crassly unfair to African-Americans. I would love to believe that there’s less injustice to racial minorities – that our consciousness has grown, a consciousness spread in part by books like To Kill A Mockingbird . It’s an interesting segue between literature and the law that a book like that, which was so overwhelmingly popular, also went on to demonstrate why something like the Civil Rights Act needed to be passed. It’s kind of a combination of the fact that it’s beautifully done and also incredibly politically correct. It’s the oppressed and innocent African-American, the noble poor person, and the virtuous white guy who’s willing to stand up to the town. It’s a story we like to hear right now, yes. I think Atticus Finch is probably more admirable to lawyers than to other readers, so being a lawyer adds something to that. I often talk about Atticus Finch because people wouldn’t believe any more in a lawyer that good. Lawyers were supposed to be paragons and the reality that they weren’t always that way came with Watergate in the seventies."

"It’s the story of a child’s summer in the Deep South, and the protagonist is a little girl called Scout and her father is Atticus Finch, who’s a single parent – she’s lost her mother. Atticus Finch is a lawyer and during this summer he defends a black man who’s wrongly accused of raping a white woman: with all that that entails. I’ve really picked this book because it just shows you that in the end great fiction can probably move more people than legislation or political speeches. A great novel can inspire people to do all sorts of great work, and I am sure that amongst my friends, and lawyers in particular, if they were asked to pick a book that’s had a profound influence on them it would be this. The genius of it is the fact that you can read it when you’re relatively young and that it can still convey some very difficult and complex messages. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . I named it as a favourite book in another interview and I got this wonderful letter from a complete stranger who said I’d like to share a story with you. Years ago this person was on a teaching exchange in the South of America, working with some children who were putting on a dramatic version of the story in a church hall. There was an elderly woman who came in at one point and was skulking around the back of the hall, and when they asked, ‘Can we help, Ma’am?’, she said, ‘Whose idea was this to put it on?’ And the teacher said, ‘Can we ask why you’re interested?’ And she said, ‘Because my name is Harper Lee and that’s my book.’ And they said: ‘What an honour to meet you and can we ask why did you never write another book?’ And the answer came: ‘Because I said everything I had to say in that book and I stand by it forever.’"