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The Giver came out when I was already in high school, and I hadn't made time to pick it up and read it in the intervening, umm, twitch, 15 years. (Given how vivid my memories of high school and middle school are, it's hard to imagine that 15 years have passed, but that is the case. I've decided that if a kids' book makes me think and argue with myself (as this one has done) it must be fairly successful. I don't think it's fair to expect an 'idea' book for kids to work for me emotionally, since my perspective is not a kid's perspective. The book is really well-written, probably well paced (it's hard for me to tell because I was waiting impatiently for the reveal of the problem, when I knew the action would get rolling), and has some reasonably meaty ideas, especially for a kid audience.
In The Giver we've got a society that has stability, calm, friendliness, etc, but (we slowly learn) has given up weather, color, music, poetry & love, and embraced radical eugenics. Jonas is exposed to memories of a different society, stops taking his meds, learns to love, and runs away to save a baby's life.
My frustration with stories of this type is that If we agree that art and color and love are necessary parts of the human experience, it seems to me that so are artistic disagreements, irrational judgements, jealousy and drama and confusion and all that. Our lived experience of love and value seems, to me, inseparable from the risk of cruelty and desperation, of pettiness and all the rest. Not the certainty, but the risk. A novel that advocates that we not use drugs and rules to minimize our emotions and our relationships should discuss how exactly you go about the tricky adult business of negotiating between the clashing values of two free actors. When are you willing to do what is wrong in order to get along with the group? When are you willing to cause someone else emotional distress by telling them things they do not want to hear? To what extent do you feel responsible for how your actions make others feel, for instance? These are the hard questions about being an adult with leisure and choice in a society that asks more of us than physical labor.
The Giver actually addresses these questions pretty well, but it does so from a kids' perspective that doesn't quite work for me, because I am not a kid anymore, and I was never a kid who trusted my parents' picture of the world around me. In the Giver, Jonas and the old man have agreed that they will inflict the memories back on an unwilling population, but the magic of the memory transference makes this a lot easier and more impersonal than having to argue piece by piece with the members of the society. Think how much harder a story it would be if Jonas had to argue with his mother, confront his father, inflict these memories on his friends who don't want them. The moment when his best childhood friend Asher is playing war with the little kids and Jonas starts to cry because he knows what real war is, was the best moment in the book for me. But I think it would succeed for most kids, because I think kids are at an age where they are developing their questions about these kinds of situations, rather than developing their answers.
In The Giver we've got a society that has stability, calm, friendliness, etc, but (we slowly learn) has given up weather, color, music, poetry & love, and embraced radical eugenics. Jonas is exposed to memories of a different society, stops taking his meds, learns to love, and runs away to save a baby's life.
My frustration with stories of this type is that If we agree that art and color and love are necessary parts of the human experience, it seems to me that so are artistic disagreements, irrational judgements, jealousy and drama and confusion and all that. Our lived experience of love and value seems, to me, inseparable from the risk of cruelty and desperation, of pettiness and all the rest. Not the certainty, but the risk. A novel that advocates that we not use drugs and rules to minimize our emotions and our relationships should discuss how exactly you go about the tricky adult business of negotiating between the clashing values of two free actors. When are you willing to do what is wrong in order to get along with the group? When are you willing to cause someone else emotional distress by telling them things they do not want to hear? To what extent do you feel responsible for how your actions make others feel, for instance? These are the hard questions about being an adult with leisure and choice in a society that asks more of us than physical labor.
The Giver actually addresses these questions pretty well, but it does so from a kids' perspective that doesn't quite work for me, because I am not a kid anymore, and I was never a kid who trusted my parents' picture of the world around me. In the Giver, Jonas and the old man have agreed that they will inflict the memories back on an unwilling population, but the magic of the memory transference makes this a lot easier and more impersonal than having to argue piece by piece with the members of the society. Think how much harder a story it would be if Jonas had to argue with his mother, confront his father, inflict these memories on his friends who don't want them. The moment when his best childhood friend Asher is playing war with the little kids and Jonas starts to cry because he knows what real war is, was the best moment in the book for me. But I think it would succeed for most kids, because I think kids are at an age where they are developing their questions about these kinds of situations, rather than developing their answers.
