The Giver is Lois Lowry’s 1994 Newberry medal winning contemporary young adult classic. It has sold more than 5.3 million copies worldwide and is an absolutely intriguing little book. Lowry gives us a utopic world but one with a constant mood of unease – one she creates with great subtlety and deceptive simplicity. Jonas is born in an ‘ideal’ world – one where there is no pain, no war, no illness. The community has sensibly agreed to living a certain way and for generations certain norms have been followed: couples are matched to each other at a certain age (hello arranged marriages! Welcome back!), each will raise two children they are given to take care of after they apply to be parents – almost sounds like Huxley’s Brave New World, and it’s just as frightening.
These children are born to ‘birthmothers’, women who hare designated to give birth 3 times in 3 years before being moved on to a life of physical labour until ‘retirement’ at a set age, before their ‘release’ from the community. Their children are taken away at birth as a matter of routine and are raised for some time in a ‘Nurturing Centre’ by professional carers. At puberty all natural impulses are stifled with pills and at age 12 each child is set a career path chosen by a group of community leaders, but based on the child’s natural aptitude. The society has worked hard to develop ‘sameness’ so that there are no differences between people, no reasons to war with one another.
Lowry develops this utopia so well, so smoothly and naturally that it is easy to be seduced by her vision, if only it weren’t for this constant feeling of unease, this underlay of quiet despair throughout the book. The opening line itself is ominous: ‘It was almost December, and Jonas was beginning to be frightened’. Lowry asks her young readers whether they would give up choice, individuality, colour, love if it meant that there would be no pain, no war, no fear and no loneliness. And its just not that easy a question to answer.