Fair’s Fair “For Book Lovers”

“Back, Back, Back” to Lois Lowry’s THE GIVER
Lowry, Lois. THE GIVER. New York: Bantam, Doubleday, Dell. 1993
0-440-21907-8

On Wednesday I drove to downtown Calgary late in the evening (too dangerous to walk the twenty or so blocks alone at night in 2007) to wander around a bookstore. There was a young man who looked completely bored sitting behind a smudged, glass counter; he was listlessly stroking a silver and gray long-haired cat that periodically opened one astonishingly blue eye, and yawned. I said to the young man, more to urge him out of his lethargy than anything else: If you could recommend one book to me, what would it be”? His eyes brightened and he leapt off the stool: “The Giver. It’s awesome! I read it in grade eleven.” (I was pleased, because usually young people will respond with “Well, my mother reads …,” or my aunt reads…”, or occasionally “my grandmother reads . . . .” Then I always hear myself say, “I’m not interested in what your mother, or aunt, or grandmother reads dear; I want to know what you read.”) I vaguely remembered that I had heard about this novel, but I hadn’t read it.

He led me over to a shelf in the children’s section and proudly showed me the store’s two copies. The portrait on the well-thumbed paper cover reminded me of one of Canada’s most distinguished writers, Rudy Wiebe. Actually, I should say, it reminded me of what I imagine Rudy Wiebe to look like before he’s poured his first cup of coffee in the morning or combed his hair. I was curious as to what this young bookseller would find interesting in Lois Lowry’s novel, which I hadn’t actually come across before, since I don’t have children and don’t spend much time in the children’s sections of bookstores. I purchased the novel and read it the next night. I can see why teenagers might really like the novel. In fact, even in my old middle-age, I enjoyed the work, probably even more because it reminded me of my own childhood favorites, and because I could imagine what it was like to be a fifteen year old reading it. To add to my pleasure of reading the The Giver, I came across the handwritten print signature of the book’s previous owner, Matthew Turner, on the inside cover. I have no idea what Matthew Turner looks like, but I imagine him to be round-faced with black curly hair, with glasses, dressed in jeans and a snap-fastener checkered cowboy shirt. While I read the book, I vicariously put myself into the being of Matthew Turner and read even more pleasurably.

There are lots of summaries of Lowry‘s The Giver, plus Reading Notes, and biographies of Lois Lowry (who apparently attended university for several years and then dropped out to marry a lawyer and has made her living as a writer every since) to be found online. BookRags online, for one, carries a substantial amount of this information.

Basically, a young man is raised in a community closed off from the rest of the world. Everything has been pared-down to an existence that is calm, but bland and gray. Memories have been given over to the Memory Giver to pass on to a young person when the time seems right, but the community itself has no collective memories except when there is a tragic death. The young boy, Jonas, is taken “back, back, back” through hundreds of visual exercises over the year including traumatic visions of bloodshed and war and still more visions of pleasant things such as sunshine, rainbows, picnics, and sliding down a hill on a sled on hard-packed snow. All of these things have been removed from his present existence. There are no hills in his “utopian” community because they are difficult to travel on, there is no snow, there is no colour because it might be confusing and a cause for comparisons (everything is in shades of gray), and jobs for each person are determined by the community when a child reaches the age of twelve.

Jonas’ job when he reaches twelve years of age is as Receiver of the memories. Jonas questions what his father does in his occupation as one of the Nurturers in the community and wants to see his father deliver a set of twins. The Giver shows Jonas a film of his father killing the twin that weighs the least by means of a drug delivered by needle to a vein in the baby’s forehead. The father refers to this as an act of “releasing.” Jonas has a little sister and the family has been asked to look after a baby named Gabriel. Gabriel is to go back to a daycare situation, but he cries all the time, and the only one he is comfortable with is Jonas, so he is allowed to sleep in Jonas’ room. When Jonas is not there the baby cries so much that the father determines that he will have to be ”Released.” Jonas cannot bear to have the baby killed. Jonas has made plans to escape on his father’s bicycle late at night. The Giver is the only one who knows about and encourages these plans. When Jonas hears that Gabriel will be killed, he decides to take him with him. They escape late at night with Gabriel strapped in a baby-seat on the back of the bike. They hide by day, and eat food that Jonas has stolen from the community and along the way. The Giver covers for Jonas and will explain to the community that Jonas has been lost in the river.

There were two other children– Caleb and Rosemary (the little daughter of the Giver) who have been lost. Caleb was declared drowned in the river, and Rosemary has disappeared. One never finds out whether Caleb actually drowned or managed to escape with the help of The Giver. Finally, Jonas comes to the places and experiences that the Giver has given to him in the past year or so to visualize. In his rush to escape with Gabriel, he did not have time to receive strength and courage from The Giver, but he knows he must survive to save Gabriel who cannot survive on his own. It is too late for him to go back to the community for he has digressed from it too long and he knows Gabriel would be “released” if he went back. He would also never learn the meaning of love. In fact, any stirrings of sexual urges are stopped by pills that boys coming of age must take for life. At the end, Jonas knows intuitively that they will be okay, and he is left with the one thing that he did not allow The Giver to give him, since he wanted the old man to retain something to help with his excruciating pain. That thing is the music of the world. It is distant, but he clearly believes he hears it.

What I enjoyed most about The Giver is its reminder to me of novels I had read when I was a child–novels such as Aldous Huxley’s Island and Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha. In Island, the island too is considered a kind of utopia, where everyone has a particular function to perform and visual imagination and the employment of visual images by members of the community play a significant role in shaping the characters’ feelings throughout. In Siddhartha (“finding one‘s goal“), Siddhartha meditates in nature by the river under the various changes of the moon. When Siddhartha comes to his “awakening” at various points throughout, he hears the ever-present “ohm” –not-unlike Jonas’ hearing of the world music at the end of The Giver. What Siddhartha discovers in the end is spiritual love–a kind of oceanic unity; what Jonas discovers in his care for Gabriel is a similar type of release from the self into a greater love for the helpless child and for the experiences yet to come.

Interestingly, though, what Lowry’s The Giver lacks is the “beauty and preciseness, or perhaps it’s the beauty inthe preciseness of language” found in Huxley’s Island and Hesse’s Siddhartha. Even Lowry’s visual meditation that takes Jonas on a sled down the hill in the snow with white flakes of snow falling all around does not carry the rhythms and power of description of a Huxley or Hess. I suspect that Lowry knew this when she was writing the work, because the very thing she mentions at the end –the distant music–is exactly the musicality the novel lacks. Was it that Lowy purposely held back from allowing the language to flow in a lyrical way, or did she not have the ability to make the language sing? Ultimately, it was this ability that placed Huxley and Hesse among the great novelists of the twentieth-century. One may never know, and she likely won’t tell. In the end, The Giver moves one in a kind of distant, but not deep sense. It would be worthwhile to read Lois Lowry’s work in conjunction with Huxley’s and Hesse’s, if for no other reason than to demonstrate the sensitivity to the nuances and rhythms of language and the depth of feeling in these two works. Vice-versa, these earlier works also enhance the memories of visual images in Lowry’s The Giver.