Now, after a few months of obfuscation, and charges and counter-charges, we finally have a book centred on a 26-year-old Jean Louise, which is strangely supposed to have been written first, before Mockingbird. Her editor, Tay Hohoff, read it in 1957 and advised her to write about Scout’s childhood instead. Good advice: for the only scenes which bring back the enchantment of Mockingbird are the flashbacks. Scout’s back in Maycomb on a two-week holiday from an unspecified job in New York City—probably advertising. Atticus is 72 and crippled by rheumatoid arthritis. Both Jem and Dill are entirely absent, which robs the book of any magic it might have had. Instead, there is a neighbour, Henry Clinton, her lifelong friend, and if he kept on kissing her like that, her husband. He is also Atticus’s junior partner, and what story Watchman possesses is concerned with Scout’s efforts to find out just what her father and swain are up to, going to a meeting in the courthouse, and why they oppose the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People), then just beginning to flex its muscles against segregation.