NOVEL REVIEW: The Giver by Lois Lowry

For some time in my younger years, one of my favourite genre of novels were dystopian novels. I was constantly fascinated by the portrayals of some unknown possible future. Some of my favourites being The City of Ember, The Hunger Games, and The Maze Runner. One of the earliest (if not the first) dystopian novels I read was The Giver by Lois Lowry, which is actually the first in a series of four interconnecting novels (all of which I have read) called The Giver Quartet. Not only was this novel already available at home, but it was also required reading for school. Nevertheless, I really loved it. The world-building was superbly done and each character was unique and interesting in their own way. I really liked the concept of the novel: in a seemingly Utopian society where all pain, along with emotional depth have been removed to "Sameness", there is only one person who is chosen to hold on to the memories of the past, and how that one person, known as the Receiver, has to deal with the emotionless, almost brainwashed society that they live in.

The book really builds up to the reveal that the community Jonas (the protagonist) lives in is completely different from the world that we know. When you first begin reading the book, you don't actually get a sense that there's anything particularly wrong with Jonas' world. There are some obvious differences like the existence of a speaker system to deliver messages through the community, jobs are assigned based on aptitude, and there is something called being "Released". During its first mention, the novel doesn't make any of it clear apart from the fact that it's a horrible punishment of some sort and it being a taboo topic for the most part. But apart from all of the different aspects of society, you don't get a full understanding of how strange everything is until it is mentioned that no one knows what an animal is, apart from it being a descriptive word for an unruly person.

The novel then mentions Release a second time, this time the Release of a baby, along with releasing of the elderly. While the releasing of babies is seen as a somber occasion, releasing the elderly is joyous occasion and a celebration of life. These different aspects of the concept of Release creates much confusion not only in the mind of the reader, but to the characters in the novel as neither can accurately pinpoint what Release actually is, because the government obscures the real truth to the point where all the citizens are told is: "Release is sometimes good, and sometimes bad, but you should never joke about it". The concept of obscuring the truth is a constant theme throughout this novel as the citizens of the Community are indeed kept from the truth, as their perception of reality and emotions have been completely warped, an example of this is the pills to counteract the "Stirrings", feelings of sexual desire, which apparently they haven't managed to suppress fully.

Truth and reality is warped to such a point that the Community becomes essentially an authoritarian society where regard for human life is completely cast aside, as their lack of emotions are unable to comprehend love, remorse, or sadness, and those words have become meaningless, stripping down society to nothing. Family is no longer a concept as children are assigned to parents who are also assigned spouses. Children are brought to life by the Birthmothers, who are impregnated in a lab. Due to this, there is no sentimentality or love between any members of the Community, and due to that, death isn't really a concept in the Community. While they do feel sadness at the Release of a newborn and at the loss of a child due to an accident, it isn't sorrow, and they seem to recover from it dangerously fast and move on with their lives if nothing had happened.

Release, like I've previously stated, is eventually revealed to be murder, and due to the indoctrination of the Community, the people who Release others do not feel any sense of remorse or shame for what they do, and feel that what they do is the right thing as they send the Released to "Elsewhere", making the process seem like a farewell ceremony to a haven of some sort rather then the brutal act it really is. The readers feel the full shock of this reality by showing Jonas' own father, always portrayed as a kind, light-hearted man, releasing the slightly "weaker" of a twin baby.

The book does make it clear however, that although the lack of love, remorse, regard for human life, etc... is indeed a negative thing, it also briefly discusses the disastrous consequences of those emotions, colour, climate, and most importantly, personal autonomy. In the novel, this is all part of a large concept of achieving "Sameness". With Sameness, where there are no colours or emotions, there can never be conflict as everyone will essentially be the same, including individual personalities. They also took away climate as cold or hot weather can cause crop failures, tornadoes destroy, etc. Although the book never actually delves into detail on how they managed to achieve Sameness, they do actually provide reasons for why Sameness is a better alternative, and even Jonas and the Giver do agree that it wouldn't exactly be safe to allow people to choose some aspects of life for themselves.

While it seems ridiculous to the reader, the points do have some validity, and the novel does make you wonder if Sameness isn't as horrible as it seems. While freedom of choice is definitely and integral component of life and it is obviously wrong for that to have been taken away from the people, their point about having no colour, emotions, and climate creating a peaceful and conflict-less world is not completely incorrect. So many of the world's problems in the last 1000 years can be traced back to racism, and one can wonder if removing skin colour and race altogether could actually be beneficial for society. Same goes for climate; natural disasters destroy environments and kill people, and maybe we could be better without it. Again with emotions; violence comes through negative emotions and maybe without any emotions we can live conflict-free.

It is obvious that these ideas are very much flawed upon closer observation, but through the casual way they approach it in the novel, along with the negative memories of pains and sufferings, it really does prompt the reader to think that maybe the people who decided to engineer Sameness was onto something, just a little bit, and if you didn't know what you were missing, would it be so bad? Would blissful ignorance be so horrible? And in fact, this is what some dystopian novels are centered around. A major example I can think of is Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. In Brave New World, most of its citizens live in blissful ignorance through the use of the drug Soma, which they use whenever feel negative emotions, and therefore always live in some sort of hallucinatory trance, allowing for easier control of them by the government. But this once again brings up the question whether or not living in constant physical pleasure would be so bad, as long as you didn't know what you were missing. So while we do know that that kind of control using ignorance is indeed bad, but it could be debated that it may not be as horrible as we'd initially believe if the people didn't know what they were missing.

While I personally don't have a clear stance on the topic of "Is the idea of a society filled with blissfully ignorant people so bad as long as they're content with it?", as both sides could be argued, it is something to think about for the readers. It would be great to hear all of your thoughts in the comment section below!

I was planning to delve into the characters and how effectively they enhanced the story, but I feel that doing that now after I've gone into the society of the novel would detract from the review a bit, but I will say that all of characters were great, and the most interesting one personally was Jonas' father, who is the only person in the Community apart from Jonas and the Giver who seems to be more 'human' then the others, as he is able to portray feelings that seem very much like love to his family and newchildren, but in the end is still the product of his society, and therefore lacks the emotional depth to fully understand love and performs the Releases with nothing but a little regret and sadness, making him one of the most compelling characters in the story.

The Giver is a great example of a dystopian novel done well, in my opinion. While I am not extremely familiar with dystopian novels, Lowry is outstanding in her ability to create and build a society that is, on surface quite similar (and perhaps even an improvement) to our own in terms of structure and everyone having some sort of job and the elderly seemingly very well cared for, but yet fundamentally so different from our society. While the differences at the beginning are very minor things, like the strict organizational structure, as the story goes on, the differences becoming more and more obvious, like animals being fictional and colour being nonexistent, the final truth of Release being murder shown in a very shocking revelation, with the person showing the truth being Jonas' own father, one of the most likable and human characters in the novel.

An issue with the novel I did have was the nature of the memories. Jonas' ultimate plan is to leave the community and therefore returning the memories to the Community. This leaves the question: What is the nature of the memories? I can accept the explanation that as Rosemary dies, the memories left her body and returned to the members of the Community. But the novel fails to explain why the memories would leave Jonas as he leaves the Community. The film adaptation (which was not the greatest, but a decent adaptation of the novel) actually gives a little more explanation to this by creating a border that seems to be the cause of the Sameness, and by crossing that border with all of his memories, Jonas would be releasing them back into the community. While it isn't a great explanation, it is an explanation, something that does lack in the novel.

While I really loved the book for its world building and its characters, the whole unexplained or elaborated concept of the "memories returning to people if Jonas left the Community" feels contrived and engineered specifically to be able to move the plot along and give the novel a satisfying conclusion. Unfortunately, that concept is a major part of the novel, and therefore does affect what is otherwise a very good plot quite a bit, as it becomes nonsensical, but since the novel is really about the world building and Jonas' discovery of these memories, I don't believe that part should be too relevant in the overall quality of the book. I still do strongly recommend readers of all ages to read the novel, as while it is intended for teenagers, it still has themes mature enough to fascinate adult readers. The Giver by Lois Lowry gets a final rating of 4.5/5. 

My apologies for taking so long to do another review, but I've been slacking off slightly due to it being summer vacation. I will attempt again to resume my weekly posting schedule, and I will try to upload another post by the end of this week, this time a movie review that I've been looking forward to for a while. As always, thank you for reading my blog, and I always will enjoy hearing from all of you, so if you have any comments, feedbacks, opinions, suggestions, etc., please feel free to comment, and I WILL respond to ALL comments!

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The Connoisseur