Lois Lowry, 1993

The literary argument question on the AP Literature exam asks students to write an essay about how an element of literature, specified in the prompt, contributes to an interpretation of a work of fiction of the student’s choice.  The test will provide as many as forty suggestions, but students have never been re­stricted to writing about the works on the list.  As recently as 2019, the instructions did caution students that if they did select a work that wasn’t on the list, it should be one “of comparable literary merit” to those that were.  That language has since been dropped, and when I went to the workshop that the College Board held in Utah to brief teachers on that year’s changes to the exam, we were told that graders are now instructed not to penal­ize students for selecting insufficiently highbrow works.  Still, the official commentary on sample essays declares that “students benefit from selecting more complex texts” because “texts with less complexity often make analysis more difficult”.  And so I do grit my teeth a bit at some of the books my students select for their diagnostic exams.  A lot of them go with The Great Gatsby, which is unquestionably a great work, but… it’s under fifty thou­sand words, and it gets assigned to virtually every high school junior in the United States.  Picking it is not a good way to stand out from the crowd.  And these days it’s often the only book juni­ors get assigned, so to see it pop up on an essay makes me won­der, hmm, have you just not read anything else since then?  Then there are the students who pick Of Mice and Men or Lord of the Flies… these are ninth-grade books.  But the real red flag is when students bust out The Giver.  That one gets assigned in middle school.  Apparently in nearly every American middle school⁠—other than the home-schooled kids, I’m not sure I’ve ever had a student who made it to high school without having to read it.  But I’d never read it⁠—it was after my time.  Therefore I had no real standing to tell my students not to use it.  So when I found a copy in a Little Free Library box, I thought it was time to develop a more informed opinion.

One reason I was wary about having students use this book on their exams was that every essay I’d read about it was vague and handwavy about the premise.  Was this just a reflection of the essay-writing proficiency of the sorts of students who chose to write about a middle school book on a practice AP exam?  Turns out, no: the book itself is vague and handwavy about the prem­ise.  Readers quickly pick up on the fact that this society is not entirely like our own⁠—for instance, we learn that babies (called “newchildren”) are raised by professional “Nurturers” in special facilities, then adopted out to families such that every family has exactly two children, one male and one female.  But why and how this came about is left unexplained, because the characters take it for granted⁠—and a lot of the value of stories like these lies in the way they call readers’ attention to aspects of their lives that are normally invisible to them.  For instance, most readers of The Giver surely take it for granted that most children are raised by their biological parents, yet educated outside the home in a com­munal setting; how many of them, prior to reading this, would have thought to ask why?  How many would have realized that it wasn’t always this way and that schools and nuclear families are relatively recent inventions in the history of our species?  Of course, another factor at work in stories like this is that usually there’s a value judgment involved.  Is this a utopia, intended to show off the author’s idea of an ideal society and highlight what’s wrong with our own by contrast?  Or is it a dystopia, warning us of where we might be headed by extrapolating prob­lematic trends?  This one actually seems neutral at first.  But the fundamental mechanism of the story is that over the course of his thirteenth year the protagonist, a boy named Jonas, discovers the dark secrets of his society that have led to The Giver getting classed as dystopian fiction.  The dark, vague, handwavy secrets.

vague, handwavy spoilers
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The big secret that makes Jonas decide that his society is evil is the meaning of “release”.  See, when people get too old to work, they are sent to retirement homes where they spend years being pampered by elder care professionals and community volunteers⁠—Jonas and his friend Fiona among them, so they know firsthand that seniors are treated well.  Eventually, each resident of the House of the Old is celebrated with a ceremony commemorating that person’s life, and is then taken away to be “released” from the community.  Jonas is horrified to learn, near the end of the book, that these people are euthanized.  I guess until then he’d thought they went off to live on a nice farm upstate.  I wonder how many middle schoolers were surprised by this twist, because to an adult reader, it is obvious that “release” means euthanasia as early as page three.  In any case, Jonas has largely soured on his society before this discovery, as he has learned about elements of the past that have been lost: animals, and music, and (somehow) color vision.  Why?  As his mentor (the titular “Giver”) explains, “Our people made that choice, the choice to go to Sameness. Be­fore my time, before the previous time, back and back and back. We relinquished color when we relinquished sunshine and did away with differences. We gained control of many things. But we had to let go of others.” That capital S suggests that this society is built around a codified political philosophy that will be spelled out at some point, but no, that speech is pretty much all we get.  The one tiny bit of specificity we get is that the “control of many things” mentioned includes “Climate Control”, but this does not seem to be a reference to global warming: though the book was published in 1993, the Giver talks about the concerns of earlier eras⁠—snow limiting agricultural production and whatnot.  Ap­parently Jonas’s society has eliminated weather, which is im­pressive considering that there’s basically nobody left.

This is another aspect of The Giver that had me scratching my head.  One of the big moments in the story is the ceremony at the end of the year when, irrespective of their actual birthdates, ev­eryone born in a given year is promoted to the next age bracket.  Jonas is eleven, turning twelve.  We are told that he was the nineteenth child born in his birth year, and that before the elders running the ceremony have counted fifty children from that birth year, they are “nearing the end”.  That there are only fifty eleven-year-olds in the entire community suggests a population of may­be three or four thousand.  There are a handful of nearby com­munities, which Jonas knows from school visits to be “essentially the same as his own”, but beyond that, wilderness.  There’s an early mention of a cargo plane, so maybe there’s some sort of outside civilization, but the book sure makes it sound like it was these people in particular who reworked the world, and there are, what, maybe fifty thousand of them?  It suggests that per­haps we’re living in a post-apocalyptic world.  But we never find out.  Not only is the book vague and handwavy on this point, but the defining characteristic of the world of The Giver, the one from which it draws its title, is that the general public is no long­er taught about the past⁠—and Lowry assures that the readers aren’t either.  This is nothing new for a dystopia: control of and erasure of the past is a huge part of Nineteen Eighty-Four, and the TV version of The Man in the High Castle had its “Jahr Null”, with all American history prior to the Nazi takeover declared void.  Real-life dystopias have done this as well: “Jahr Null” echoes Pol Pot’s “Year Zero” in Kampuchea.  In The Giver, the past has not been erased entirely: it is preserved by one member of the community, the “Receiver of Memory”.  When he turns twelve, Jonas is selected as the next Receiver of Memory, and serves an apprenticeship under the current one (i.e., the Giver), who passes on memories of the past through a magical laying on of hands.  Despite the name, though, what Jonas receives are not memories so much as flashbacks: he relives the experiences his mentor conveys to him.  We also learn that the Giver seems to experience these flashbacks himself, involuntarily, much as described by Bessel van der Kolk in The Body Keeps the Score; Jonas sometimes arrives for his training only to find the Giver in agony.  Once he has a little experience, Jonas asks what he can do to help, and the Giver shares a flashback he is experiencing: that of a young soldier dying on a nineteeth-century battlefield.  We’re told that these memories have been withheld from the public because, if they were generally shared, “everyone would be burdened and pained”⁠—that their happiness depends on the misery of the Receiver, Omelas-style.  But most of the memories are happy, and so the real crime, the novel suggests, is not that the Receiver suffers but that the public never learns how awe­some things were in the olden days, i.e., what to the reader is the present.

Apparently there is some debate about whether The Giver is conservative, but to me this is pretty definitive.  Forget about the particular issues of this era or that⁠—just go by etymology.  To be progressive is to want to move society forward, to make positive change⁠—that’s the progress.  What Jonas and the Giver decide that they want, in their world, is to move backward⁠—to react against the changes that have been made.  Therefore, within the story, they are reactionaries.  But what they’re trying to return to is the way things are in the readers’ world.  The project of the novel is to impress upon readers the value of the world as it is.  And that is inherently conservative.  To be conservative, at bot­tom, is to want things to stay the way they are.  Hence the name!  What does the conservative wish to conserve?  The status quo!  So now let’s get into specifics, to the extent that this is possible in writing about such a vague, handwavy book.  What are Lowry’s targets?  What aspects of Jonas’s society are we meant to come away from the book thinking of in a negative light?  Oddly, one of Lowry’s main targets is the apology!  People in Jonas’s commu­nity are trained to apologize for such misdeeds as being late to school, interrupting others, and standing up friends you’ve agreed to meet up with.  Lowry seems to find this supremely annoying, and I can imagine being vexed by the apology police during the height of the “nopology” furor on social media circa 2010 or thereabouts, but… these are things people should apolo­gize for!  They’re not the end of the world, but they’ve actually all been real problems for me or mine.  Having the key moment of your lesson disrupted by a student blithely sauntering in twenty minutes late… beginning a paragraph-long reply in a conversa­tion and getting cut off five words in… watching ninety percent of your plans fall through because people in the smartphone age think it’s fine to cancel by text half an hour beforehand six weeks in a row… all of these things strike me as far more irritating than over-apologizing.  And while I don’t recall this being an issue in 1993, over the course of the past two decades the very notion of the apology has become politicized.  The teabaggers accused Barack Obama of starting his presidency with an “apology tour”; then they glommed onto Donald Trump, whose doctrine was never to apologize when caught in the wrong, but always to double down and counterattack.  So Lowry’s aversion to apolo­gies places her in poor company.

An even more problematic target of Lowry’s is the notion of “control”⁠—of a society organizing itself to be able to make col­lective decisions about how to run things.  But… take away con­trol, and you’re left with laissez-faire, and laissez-faire is a disas­ter.  Look at the Hoover administration.  Look at traffic before the advent of controlled intersections.  Going hand in hand with Lowry’s antipathy toward “control” is a disdain for rules and for the bureaucracy that those rules add up to.  One of the first things we are told about the world of the story is that “When something went to a committee for study, the people always joked about it. They said that the committee members would become Elders by the time the rule change was made.”  But while bureaucracy has long been fodder for jokes, recent events have shown that taking a chainsaw to it has dire consequences.  The doggie boys’ assault on the Internal Revenue Service has lost the American public half a trillion dollars just this year by crippling its ability to pursue tax cheats, for instance.  Similar attacks on the Social Security Administration have led to over three quar­ters of calls going unanswered.  Trying to paint a working bur­eaucracy as dystopian doesn’t really work for readers forced to deal with the remnants of a shattered one.

As for rules in general, I mean, a big part of the reason that we’re in this fix is that our society has been poisoned by the attitude toward rules on display in The Giver.  Recall that, ten years ago, the pundits were certain that at any moment Donald Trump’s run for the presidency would implode, because history had shown that American campaigns were all about the politics of the moment: a candidate would say or do something that contra­vened the bounds of what was viewed as acceptable, the media would pounce, and the candidate’s public standing would plum­met.  Some examples:

• 1972: Democratic frontrunner Edmund Muskie’s campaign for the presidency derails when he gives a speech defend­ing his wife from smears in the right-wing media, and mel­ted snowflakes on his face make it appear to some as if he is crying.

• 1987: The Miami Herald reports that a woman named Donna Rice was seen entering the D.C. townhouse of Dem­ocratic frontrunner Gary Hart while his wife was out of town.  Both deny an affair, but Hart ends his campaign for the presidency.

• 1987: One of the top contenders for the presidential nomi­nation after Hart’s exit, Joe Biden, is caught on tape para­phrasing a speech by Neil Kinnock, leader of Britain’s La­bour Party; normally he credited Kinnock, but on this one occasion he neglected to do so.  Biden withdraws.

• 2004: Democratic frontrunner Howard Dean strains his voice trying to shout “Yeah!” above the din of a cheering crowd; it sounds funny on the TV microphones, and pundits agree that his campaign for the presidency is therefore doomed.

• 2006: Republican senator George Allen, heavily favored in his run for re-election, uses a Portuguese racial slur to refer to a dark-skinned representative of the opposing campaign; his polling numbers tank and he loses in an upset.

• 2011: Republican frontrunner Herman Cain abruptly drops out of the race for the presidency after four women accuse him of sexual harassment and a fifth reveals a thirteen-year affair.

• 2012: Todd Akin, a Republican nominee favored to defeat the incumbent Democrat for a Senate seat, dismisses the need for a rape exception to the abortion ban he seeks, stating that pregnancy virtually never occurs in cases of what he terms “legitimate rape”.

The speech with which Trump kicked off his first run for the presidency, on 2015.0615, would have killed most campaigns on day one, as he barked that immigrants from Mexico were “bring­ing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists”⁠—but Trump had gained a political following in the first place through racist attacks on Barack Obama, so pundits were not surprised that he maintained his standing in the polls.  But just a month later, when Trump declared that John McCain, who had refused to abandon lower-ranking prisoners of war and thus spent 1967 to 1973 being tortured by the North Vietnamese, was “not a war hero”, the pundits uniformly declared that Trump’s campaign was clearly finished: a presidential candidate, particularly a draft dodger, can’t insult the military service of the guy all his suppor­ters had voted for seven years earlier.  Except it turned out that he could.  A few months later he mocked a reporter’s disability; this also proved not to be disqualifying.  Calling on a geopolitical adversary to attack his opponent… paying $25 million to settle a fraud lawsuit… getting caught on tape snickering about his predilection for sexual assault, another moment that the media declared the certain death knell of the Trump campaign… half the country just did not care.  Or, no⁠—half of that half did care, insofar as they liked the fact that every day Trump committed a transgression that would have driven anyone else from not just a presidential race but one for dogcatcher.  Backing him was their way of making the same statement Lowry makes in The Giver: all of society’s rules for how to behave like a decent human being are just, like, so onerous, man!  And though the slippery slope is often deemed a logical fallacy, we’ve seen it in action since that 2016 campaign.  Back in those days, voters could tell themselves that they were tired of the media “gotcha games” that had taken down so many candidates in the past, and were proud to back a candidate who was “politically incorrect” and who “tells it like it is” instead of following all those annoying rules about what you can and can’t say and do and think.  But cut to a few years later, and that transgressiveness now encompasses thirty-four felony convictions, two impeachments, and indictments for stealing classified national security documents, attempting to overthrow the incoming United States government by stoking a violent insurrection, and using mafia tactics against a state government to falsify election results⁠—and that doesn’t even include the turn toward fascism and the brazen, unapologetic corruption of the current term. 

For a counterpoint, I recently watched a video about how Den­mark, already fourth in the world in human development (per the U.N.) and second in happiness (per Oxford), has seen its economy flourish in the 2020s amid the rest of the world’s win­try economic climate: remarkable growth, low inflation, high employment, low debt that continues to shrink due to budget surpluses, etc.  The video proposed many reasons for this: labor laws that encourage both high wages and high productivity; an investment in renewables that has lowered energy costs and, consequently, led to a boom in manufacturing; and, of course, the success of Novo Nordisk’s anti-obesity drugs.  But Danes in the comments insisted that the video had left out the most impor­tant component of Denmark’s success: low corruption.  This came up in my 2024 election writeup:

I took a class on the Nordic countries from a professor whose previous area of specialization had been modern Asia.  He brought up the fact that, in multiple indices tracking corruption around the world, Nordic countries made up four of the six least corrupt nations on the globe.  Some chalked this up to factors such as wealth, ethnic homogeneity, and freedom from colonialism, he said, but he didn’t buy those arguments.  Bangladesh was ethnic­ally homogenous but grotesquely corrupt.  South Korea was eth­nically homogenous and rich, but its score did not impress.  On the flip side, he said, look at Finland.  Finland had spent more than a century under Russian occupation.  Finland had been extremely poor between the two world wars.  Yet, even then, it had been remarkable for its low corruption.  His contention was that the main cause was the character that Finnish culture tried to incul­cate in each successive generation: one based on trust in others, a commitment to fairness, a disrespect for undue privilege, and an unwillingness to let infractions slide.

That unwillingness to let infractions slide is key.  The lack of it has enabled the rise of American fascism.  The founders of the republic designed a system to protect against the accession of a malefactor to high office, but it depended on the idea that crimi­nal conduct would be condemned by more than just a minority faction.  That if you crossed the line, your public support would collapse to nothing, your political allies would join with your op­ponents to drive you from office, and the legitimate government, once restored, would prosecute your crimes with swiftness and vigor.  But when the country was put to the test, none of that happened.  Not enough people actually believed in the values upon which the nation was ostensibly based.  Belief is an impor­tant theme in dystopian fiction; Nineteen Eighty-Four is to a great extent about how a state that has long since achieved the ability to impose compliance by force nonetheless also demands compliance by belief.  On the flip side, in other dystopian works the chance that there are those who do not believe in the princi­ples of the state is often the spark of hope⁠—in corruption and factionalism lies the possibility that the nightmare society could unravel.  One thing I found strange about The Giver is that the story was told as if it were about a community populated entirely by true believers, constantly on the lookout for thoughtcrime, apart from the once and future Receivers of Memory⁠—but that isn’t actually the case.  There are signs of corruption, if you want to call it that, right from the get-go.  Recall that the first thing we learn about the bureaucracy in the world of the novel is that everyone makes jokes about it.  Similarly, we are introduced to the idea that this society has a lot of rules and that breaking them has dire consequences, but then immediately we learn that people break rules all the time.  Kids aren’t supposed to ride bicycles until they turn nine, but it is an open secret that older siblings teach their younger siblings how to ride long before that, on the sly.  Jonas’s father works as a Nurturer, and while Nur­turers aren’t supposed to see the lists of names assigned to the newchildren prior to the big naming ceremony, Jonas’s father sneaks a peek⁠—and Jonas’s mother, who is a justice minister, doesn’t mind at all.  Even by age seven, Jonas’s little sister Lily giggles at the dinner table as she suggests breaking some other rules, knowing that she won’t get in trouble.  She has already registered that her society is a bit lax when it comes to enforce­ment.  But the book itself generally seems as though it has not registered this.

The same is true when it comes to the supposed policy of “Same­ness”.  On the surface, The Giver champions individualism and excoriates uniformity; we’re told that one of the happy memories that has the most impact on Jonas involves “a birthday party, with one child singled out and celebrated on his day, so that now he understood the joy of being an individual, special and unique and proud”.  It reads like Lowry is trying to get a jacket blurb from the corpse of Ayn Rand.  But, at the birthday ceremony held for Jonas and all his agemates, we see the Chief Elder announce that it is a day to “honor your differences”; when she gets to Jonas’s friend Asher, for instance, she gives a long speech about his distinctive qualities, full of anecdotes from his childhood.  The employment system in the society of The Giver is based on the idea that people have different talents and interests, and it is in the best interest of both the society and its individual mem­bers to make good matches.  For an employment system truly based on the notion of “sameness”, consider what the Director of Hatcheries in Brave New World promotes as the goal of his outfit: “Ninety-six identical twins working ninety-six identical ma­chines!”  And that’s just a start⁠—ultimately the world would con­sist of “standard Gammas, unvarying Deltas, uniform Epsilons. Millions of identical twins”.  Meanwhile, in The Giver, the reason Jonas’s father euthanizes a newchild, horrifying Jonas and driv­ing him into the wilderness, is that the newchild is an identical twin.  As Jonas himself explains, before he learns what “release” really means: “Well, they can’t have two identical people around! Think how confusing it would be!”  So… the community is against sameness, then?  To the point of killing over it?  Not super co­herent!

But since I’ve brought up Brave New World, I should mention that despite the big difference outlined above, there’s also a ton of ideological overlap here.  What Aldous Huxley found so dysto­pian about the Brave New World he had created⁠—a world based on his projections of where the world seemed to be going, circa the late 1920s⁠—was that it had done away with all that he most cherished:

• Family:  “Try to realize what it was like to have a vivipar­ous mother.”  That smutty word again.  But none of them dreamed, this time, of smiling.  “Try to imagine what ‘living with one’s family’ meant.”  They tried; but obviously with­out the smallest success.  “And do you know what a ‘home’ was?”  They shook their heads.

• Religion:  “There used to be something called God […] God isn’t compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness.  You must make your choice.” Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and hap­piness. ”

  […] “But God’s the reason for everything noble and fine and heroic.  If you had a God…”

  […] “Civilization has absolutely no need of nobility or heroism.”

• Emotional depth:  “You’ve got to choose between happi­ness and what people used to call high art. […] Actual hap­piness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery. […] And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt.  Happiness is never grand.”

The Giver doesn’t go into nearly as much depth on these counts, but Lowry hits pretty much the same ones.  It might not initially seem as though Jonas’s society has lost touch with emotion, even negative emotion, as the book starts with Jonas reflecting on his apprehension about turning twelve, and we learn that it is a custom in this world for families to discuss the day’s emotional journey at the dinner table.  But by the end, Jonas has concluded that, despite this, the people in his world lack emotional depth.  “‘I felt angry because someone broke the play area rules,’ Lily had said once, making a fist with her small hand to indicate her fury. […] But Lily had not felt anger, Jonas realized now.  Shallow impatience and exasperation, that was all Lily had felt.  He knew that with certainty because now he knew what anger was.  Now he had, in the memories, experienced injustice and cruelty, and he had reacted with rage that welled up so passionately inside him that the thought of discussing it calmly at the evening meal was unthinkable.”  The book presents this as progress for Jonas.  That is, both Huxley and Lowry value a world full of injustice and rage over one in which injustice has been replaced by minor inconveniences and rage has been replaced by minor irritation.  As for religion, one of the key memories Jonas receives is of a Christmas morning: “There were colored lights: red and green and yellow, twinkling from a tree which was, oddly, inside the room.”  This moment also puts a spotlight on the importance of family.  Jonas’s world has families⁠—“mother” and “father” and “home” are not foreign concepts⁠—but Lowry uses this memory to paint nuclear families with two adopted children as inade­quate.  In the memory there are “other children” than just two, and adults who are “obviously” their parents due to their genetic resemblance, and grandparents⁠—a concept that is foreign to Jonas, because in his world, “the Old of the community did not ever leave their special place, the House of the Old, where they were so well cared for and respected”.  Upon reflecting on the memory, Jonas decides that the old ways were best:

        “[…] I was thinking, I mean feeling, actually, that it was kind of nice, then.  And that I wish we could be that way, and that you could be my grandparent.  The family in the memory seemed a little more—”  He faltered, not able to find the word he wanted.
        “A little more complete,” The Giver suggested.

The outsider in Brave New World asks, “Isn’t there something in living dangerously?”, and Lowry hits this point as well, having Jonas recognize that the Christmas memory represents “a dan­gerous way to live”; when the Giver asks, “What do you mean?”, Jonas finds that “he could feel that there was risk involved, though he wasn’t sure how”.  Ultimately he names the fireplace and the candles as examples of danger⁠—open flame!⁠—but says that “I did like the light they made. And the warmth.”  But Lowry says flat out that this is just Jonas “grasping for an explanation”, and the clear suggestion is that the risk is that not all families match this idyllic memory of warm filial love.  The old ways⁠—i.e., our ways⁠—condemn vast swaths of the population to grow up in dysfunctional or even abusive families.  But who cares, because for some of the rest, Christmas is nice!!

I dunno⁠—I just find it perverse that there are so many people whose first instinct when thinking about a world where everyone is happy is to cast about for ways that that could be bad.  Oh, but isn’t there a nobility to suffering?  I also find it ironic that so often one of the key arguments against these sorts of utopias is that they’re too safe and that life should involve an element of risk⁠—but the people who make these arguments want to cling to the status quo because, y’know, if you change things, some of those changes m‑might turn out to be b‑b‑bad!  It says something that this book’s main strategy to scare us away from progress is to invent ludicrous bugaboos: if the reformers win, they’ll take away our music! and sunshine! and color (somehow)! and ani­mals⁠—THEY’RE EATING THE DOGS!!  Up top I wondered whether Jonas’s community is supposed to strike the reader as dystopian right from the start, due to all those oppressive rules and all that oppressive sameness, or whether it was supposed to come off as utopian at first, before we find out what its members have lost.  I said that it seemed neutral, and the world of The Giver certainly isn’t my idea of utopia.  But reading this book in the crumbling America of 2025, I couldn’t help but wonder:  Lois Lowry is still alive.  Does she real­ize how great basically any sort of function­ing society sounds right about now?  It’s like we’re living in a version of 1873 in which Jay Gould had bankrolled a successful effort to reinstall a KKK-backed, retribution-minded Andrew Johnson in the White House, and the first order of business was for top lieutenant Nathan Bedford Forrest to “reconstruct” the North by instituting and vigorously enforcing the “black codes”.  And the reason Johnson won was that thirty percent of the elec­torate wanted to redo the Civil War and twenty percent were so stupid that they thought Andrew Johnson and Andrew Jackson were the same guy.  Oh, and this version of Andrew Johnson has tertiary neurosyphilis.  Compared to that, neutral is utopic.  Of course, The Giver takes the stance that its big reveal makes its society a species of hell.  And I’ve heard that argument before.  I grew up in Orange Coun­ty in the 1980s.  I am used to getting out of school to find Chick tract distributors in the parking lot screaming about how Roe v. Wade means “THEY’RE KILLIN’ BABIES!!”.  Apparently their message has been moved out of the parking lot and into the curriculum.

I started this article by talking about the AP Literature exam.  When I taught AP Literature at a public high school, I kicked things off by having my students read selections from Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye.  This is because, following in the footsteps of the literary theory survey course I took as an undergrad, I want­ed the first unit to cover the formalist “New Criticism” of a cen­tury ago, which declared that texts should be analyzed based entirely upon what is on the page.  As their name suggests, the New Critics framed their movement as a departure from estab­lished practice, which interpreted literary works largely through the lens of the author’s biography.  Cat’s Eye makes the case that, if you care about what an author is trying to express, consciously or unconsciously, this approach is much more likely to bear fruit than that of the formalists.  That certainly seems to be the case here.  I didn’t know anything about Lois Lowry until after I fin­ished this book, and then I read something that made a lot of things click into place.  Lois Lowry grew up on army bases, cut off from the wider world.  Doesn’t that explain a lot?  The small size of Jonas’s community, and the fact that there are others scat­tered around but they’re pretty much the same?  The (ostensible) emphasis on uniformity?  The way that children’s ages are treat­ed as ranks?  The panoply of rules, right down to what hairstyle you’re required to wear at each age?  The top-down assignment of jobs, the way troops get assigned Military Occupation Special­ties?  The Giver made so much more sense to me once I had learned this.  Dystopian literature tends to be polemical⁠—readers are meant to take away a message.  So now I can slot this in with some other authors’ messages:

• Orwell: Don’t fall for authoritarian propaganda

• Huxley: Don’t trade traditional values for happiness

• Lowry: Don’t grow up on an army base

spoilers for
     this too

When I found the background information about Lois Lowry’s upbringing, I also discovered that The Giver had been made into a movie, so I figured I’d give it a look.  Somehow I lived through 2014 without hearing about this cinematic adapta­tion, so as I was reading the book, I wondered why it had never been filmed.  Then I thought I had discovered why: the whole trick with Jonas learning about color is that, at first, he doesn’t know what he’s experiencing⁠—he just says that particular items suddenly look “strange” or have a “mysterious quality”.  Only when the Giver tells him “You’re beginning to see the color red” do we discover that Jonas and everyone else in his community has been seeing in monochrome this whole time.  How do you do that in a movie?  If you show everything in black and white nor­mally but use color in Jonas’s POV shots, you’ll give it away from the start!  So what do you do?  Well, it turns out that the film­makers start off by showing everything in black and white nor­mally but use color in Jonas’s POV shots.  So much for that little mystery.

But it turns out not to be surprising that the filmmakers don’t try to make the color revelation into a bigger moment, because they rush through a lot of the material.  In the book, Jonas is selected as the next Receiver of Memory almost exactly one third of the way through; the film squeezes that moment into the first twelve minutes.  In the book, Jonas discovers the meaning of “release” very close to the end; the film places it much closer to the halfway point.  I found myself wondering why they were cramming so much of the story into the first hour of the film⁠—what would be left for the rest of the running time?  But that just goes to show how long I’ve been out of the screenwriting game, because once I saw the answer, it was totally obvious.  It was chase scenes.  But on top of the pacing issues, the movie isn’t very concerned about mystery or ambiguity in general.  As noted above, the book doesn’t reveal what led to the establishment of Jonas’s society; the movie states right off the bat that it was in­deed an apocalypse.  The book leaves the ending open for inter­pretation: either Jonas is hurtling on a sled toward a civilization separate from his own, or he is experiencing a dying hallucina­tion.  The movie Raises the Stakes™ with a Ticking Clock™, establishing that if Jonas crosses a set boundary his community will magically start to see things as he does, but poor Fiona gets brought in for forced “release” while he’s on his way, so the movie cuts back and forth between Jonas racing toward the finish line and a lethal injection needle slowly heading for Fiona’s arm.  It is laughably formulaic.

I did like that Fiona gets a bigger role in the movie than in the book, though.  I’m sure that some of this is just that, in the book, everyone other than Jonas and the Giver have what are essen­tially bit parts, and it’s hard to get actors to sign on for bit parts.  (The performer who actually does sign on for a bit part is, today, the biggest name of them all: Taylor Swift gets a few lines as Jonas’s predecessor, Rosemary.  Unfortunately, the movie fum­bles the book’s revelations about her.)  Fiona, in the book, is a member of Jonas’s cohort of eleven-year-olds; her role is mainly to serve as the focus of a mildly sexy dream Jonas has, which tells his parents that it’s time to put him on the libido suppres­sion drugs the adults in this society all take.  But in typical fashion, the movie has aged all the characters up, so that Jonas and friends have just turned eighteen rather than twelve; Fiona therefore gets upgraded to a genuine love interest.  Meanwhile, the formula says that stories must have conflict, and man vs. society ain’t enough⁠—you must have villains!  So various charac­ters have been selected to serve as antagonists.  Asher, another member of the cohort, doesn’t do much in the book except make some malapropisms; in the movie, he’s the one who doubles down on his commitment to the rules when Jonas and Fiona start breaking them, leading to a showdown.  Jonas’s adoptive mother, as noted above, is a justice minister, but in the book she’s as easy-going about the rules as Jonas’s adoptive father, and plays a minor role; in the movie, she’s Jonas’s chief adver­sary on the home front, played by Katie Holmes as a strict, sour-tempered ghoul.  (I’m glad my 1998 self didn’t live to see that.)  And then at the big ceremony we meet the Chief Elder, just like in the book, and I was surprised to find that they’d managed to land Meryl effin’ Streep for such a small role⁠—only to discover that, yeah, you don’t really hire Meryl Streep for a walk-on.  In the movie, she turns out to be the big bad: popping into Jonas’s home via hologram to interrogate him about the training, calling the Giver on the carpet for turning Jonas into a rebel, and even­tually ordering both Jonas and Fiona to be put to death.  The thing is, I’d actually classify most of these moves as improve­ments: they flagged up the fact that, yeah, the original novel really is quite light on character.  And while it didn’t need chase scenes, the book is kind of inert, and bouncing a more varied set of characters off each other is more interesting than just Jonas and the Giver in scene after scene.

For example, in the book there’s an exchange early on in Jonas’s training that unfolds in Brave New World’s signature fashion: characters react with disbelief or even horror to ideas that readers are supposed to think are good.  In this case, it’s about individuals making choices for themselves.  The Giver is already in favor of this, but wants Jonas to tumble to the idea himself:

“We don’t dare to let people make choices of their own.”

“Not safe?” The Giver suggested.

“Definitely not safe,” Jonas said with certainty.  “What if they were allowed to choose their own mate?  And chose wrong?

“Or what if,” he went on, almost laughing at the absurdity, “they chose their own jobs?”

“Frightening, isn’t it?” The Giver said.

Jonas chuckled.  “Very frightening.  I can’t even imagine it.  We really have to protect people from wrong choices.”

On the flip side, imagine how absurd it would be if, in order to match people up with employment that would suit their talents, that they would find fulfilling, and that would best meet the needs of the community, we forced people to scout for job oppor­tunities all on their own, and they if they did somehow catch wind of an appealing one, they had to compete for it against rival job-seekers like they were on some sort of demented game show?  But anyway⁠—the filmmakers sharpen up the discussion of choice by making it an actual debate between the Giver and the Chief Elder:

CHIEF ELDER

You should know better than anyone.  You have seen children starve.  You’ve seen people stand on each other’s necks just for the view.  You know what it feels like when men blow each other up over a simple line in the sand⁠—

GIVER

I⁠—I do, but⁠—

CHIEF ELDER

And yet⁠—and yet!  You and Jonas want to open that door again, bring all that back⁠—

GIVER

If you could only see the possibility of love⁠—with love comes faith, with comes hope [sic]!

CHIEF ELDER

Love is just passion that can turn⁠—it turns into contempt and murder.

GIVER

We could choose better!

CHIEF ELDER
(with a dismissive laugh)

People are weak.  People are selfish.  When people have the freedom to choose, they choose wrong every single time.

A bit of an overstatement, perhaps.  Since this movie came out, two thirds of the time seems like the more accurate figure.

Finally, I did note that, perhaps to fend off charges that the book can be reduced to “progress is bad because reformers will do away with Christmas”, the holiday celebrations Jonas experien­ces through the memories represent cultures from around the world.  Similarly, the Giver fortifies Jonas’s resolve to fight the power by showing him memories of protests from all over the globe.  That was nice to see, watching this movie the evening of No Kings Day!  There’s an awful lot to protest these days: the rise of ethnofascism both home and abroad, the impoverishment of the masses by a class of parasitical oligarchs, wars of conquest, outright genocide, sabotage of attempts to preserve the habita­bility of the planet, and much more.  And seeing a different angle on the material of the novel crystallized some of The Giver’s issues for me.  For instance, the filmmakers give Fiona a little speech about how she reacted to going off the mandated medi­cation: “I felt things⁠—I know that there’s something more, some­thing missing from our lives,” she says.  But none of the problems above arose because of a deficit of feeling.  This is not the early nineteenth century, and we are not emerging from a century of cool-headed Enlightenment rationality, in need of Romanticism to show us the way to reconnect with passion and imagination.  On the contrary⁠—things are getting worse precisely because of the erosion of societal checks on those visceral impulses, on hate and greed and tribalism.  You can argue that, no, The Giver isn’t saying that we are insufficiently driven by emotion, but rather is trying to warn us of the dangers of overcorrecting and becoming overly cerebral.  If so, that’s a bit like telling someone whose appendix is about to burst not to have the surgery because of the risk of getting addicted to the postoperative painkillers.  Like, sure, that is a concern, but maybe focus on not dying first?

My decennial poll asks visitors to recommend books that they enjoy, not necessarily that they think I would enjoy, and yet despite this I can never help but wonder why a visitor recom­mended a given book to me.  In this case, I kept thinking, “Oh, it’s probably because of Endless, Nameless!”  In that game, I wanted to send the player character to a multi-level afterlife, but I very much did not want to use the Christian version with heaven and hell and whatnot.  I don’t believe in Buddhist mythology, but since I do believe in the First Noble Truth, I elected to go the Buddhist route and code up niraya and the peta loka instead.  So, here’s a book that turns out to be based on Buddhist mythology.  It was not originally the next book in the visitor recommenda­tions queue, but I found an audiobook version, so I thought I’d give it a go because even I can’t listen to Negative Spaces on every car trip for seven months.  Anyway, this is what this novel is like:

“Coldness?” he asked, extending his arms.  “I can break a giant with these hands, Yama.  What are you but a banished carrion god?  Your frown may claim the aged and the infirm.  Your eyes may chill dumb animals and those of the lower classes of men.  I stand as high above you as a star above the ocean’s bottom.”

Yama’s red-gloved hands fell like a pair of cobras upon his throat.  “Then try that strength which you so mock, Dreamer.  You have taken on the appearance of power.  Use it!  Best me not with words!”

His cheeks and forehead bloomed scarlet as Yama’s hands tightened upon his throat.  His eye seemed to leap, a green search-light sweeping the world.

Mara fell to his knees.  “Enough, Lord Yama!” he gasped.  “Wouldst slay thyself?”

I can’t listen to that.  Maybe it reads better than it sounds; I did find a paperback copy of this in a Little Free Library, so perhaps down the line I will give the print version a try.  Or perhaps I will not.

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