Lois Lowry's The Giver - Book Review

I am a huge fan of cinema, and as such I am an avid reader of some of the bigger movie blogs out there. What this also permits me to do is to become somewhat of a retrospective reader.

Whenever my favourite movie blog Slash Film announces a new book adaptation, most of the time I have at least heard of the book, or been lucky enough to have read it. That being said, every once in a while along comes a movie being created from a book I have never heard about. The Giver by Lois Lowry is one of those books.

How I couldn’t have heard of it, considering I’m such an avid reader of sci-fi/fantasy I just don’t understand. Googling it generated thousands of responses, and if I wanted to I could have waded into the ocean of reviews, cliffs notes, opinions, and essays all about this 1993 award winning novel.

So I declined to read the reviews, I turned away from the cliffs notes and instead switched on my Kindle to see if it was available. It was. And such an interesting, albeit brief journey The Giver took me on.

I have an innate ability to read extremely quickly. When the last few Harry Potter books were released I was one of the first on the fan forums ready to discuss what occurred (yes, I’m admitting here there was a stage of my life when I frequented Harry Potter fan forums). As such, I completed The Giver across two nights, only pausing because sleep was at that stage, a required process for function.

So for those of you who haven’t read The Giver, how should I summarise it?

Jonas lives in a utopian society. There is no pain, no suffering, no disadvantage, no poverty or hunger. Many generations ago Jonas’ society adopted an existence of “sameness” - for where can there be sadness and pain when you take the choices that lead to this existence away? Lowry spends some time building this environment and its serene existence for the reader, while slowly introducing disturbing undertones and touching on the anxiety Jonas feels about his twelfth birthday. In this society, upon turning twelve an individual will be allocated the job they will perform for the rest of their life. When informed of his job, Jonas is as shocked as everyone else.

Jonas will be The Receiver.

A role only allocated once every few generations, The Receiver’s role is to form a relationship with The Giver, whose task is to transfer all the memories of the human world to Jonas for him to hold on behalf of the community. It is in undergoing this process that Jonas truly begins to understand and comprehend the gravity of what his people have given up to adopt their “utopian” lifestyle, and as a result he begins to question everything he thought was right.

Personally, I found The Giver to be quite unnerving. While only halfway through I admitted to a work colleague that I found the story disturbing and I wondered at the messages Lowry was trying to send.

I have always struggled with the concept that writers build their stories with a hidden message interwoven throughout. I mean, seriously, why can’t we just let a story BE a story? Do we really think Shakespeare wrote Hamlet hoping that hundreds of years later classes of school children would be analysing Hamlet’s soliloquy? Maybe Shakespeare just wanted to write a story about a guy who was cheesed off because his father was murdered by his uncle! I don’t know, maybe it’s a sign I need to put more thought into my own writing, however I’m fairly certain that up until a certain point Lowry is trying to send some messages about the benefits of the society we currently live in, in comparison to Jonas’s “utopian” existence.

The story itself however plods along and builds to a point of great potential, and then for me, it seems to unravel. Imagine someone pushing a tiny snowball down a hill, hoping it will gain speed and size, and instead it isn’t big enough and dissolves with a puff halfway to the bottom. That was The Giver for me.

Jonas reaches a point in the story where he makes a decision to act, however I think the journey he goes on to reach this decision could have been built with more foundation. Here is a person who has been raised to believe something, it’s the foundation of his very existence, and yet within days he is questioning beliefs he didn’t even know were optional before. The internal struggle must have been immense but for me I don’t feel I was taken on that journey.

The last few chapters speed to an uncertain conclusion, which is in itself a brave ending that leaves the reader thinking, but could have been so much richer.

So my ultimate conclusion? Being brutally honest, my first feeling upon completion was regret. If only this story had been given the investment it deserved, so much potential wasted. That being said, this is a well loved novel which has developed into a literature staple for many curriculums, so maybe I’m missing something?  I will be reading this one again, if anything to try and take from it the love so many others have.

What did you think?

Check it out here: The Giver

Tripping Tipsy: 3 stars.

5 stars:  Amazing, definitely being added to my personal collection!

4 stars:  Enjoyable.

3 stars:  Not bad.

2 stars:  What happened?

1 star:   Can I get those wasted hours of my life back please?