Review - The Giver
Jan. 7th, 2010 09:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wilderthanLois Lowry's The Giver reminded me, a little, of an Ursula Le Guin short story which always sticks in my mind: "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas". It's the same concept where a single person (or very few people, anyway) have to bear the weight of suffering alone. In different ways, of course: in the short story, it is actual suffering, whereas in The Giver, it is many memories of suffering.
I found that it was a little odd in places, because in places the world is quite clearly drawn and things are as we would expect them to be in a society that developed from ours -- for example, control of emotions/desires through pills -- and then in other places it's quite vague, for example in how memories are transmitted, what actual process could do that, and in how that society actually came about. I like what someone said in a discussion group I'm in about it -- that it seems closer to a parable. I've shelved it as 'fantasy' because it certainly doesn't have the hard and fast rules that, by and large, I expect to see in science fiction, although it is a bit of both.
I enjoyed it quite a lot. It's not hard to read, though the emotional themes are perhaps not for all children. I would have enjoyed it as a child, but I read 1984 at about the age of nine, and if that didn't psychologically damage me... It's told from the point of view of a person who, inside the artificially created and regulated community, slowly becomes aware that, for all their apparent order, they've lost a lot of things that one might consider more important -- true feelings like love, and things like art and music, even the ability to see in colour. He finds that things he used to regard without any real emotion basically add up to unnecessary murder. His world view is completely altered, and he -- and his mentor, who is the Giver -- decide to go against the years of tradition and try to give back to the people the things that they gave up in return for order.
The book does not tell you how that works out, following the main character away from that place. I like the ending, the way it leaves so much to the imagination, and I don't want to read the other books to find out exactly what happens. I want Schrodinger's cat both alive and dead.
I found that it was a little odd in places, because in places the world is quite clearly drawn and things are as we would expect them to be in a society that developed from ours -- for example, control of emotions/desires through pills -- and then in other places it's quite vague, for example in how memories are transmitted, what actual process could do that, and in how that society actually came about. I like what someone said in a discussion group I'm in about it -- that it seems closer to a parable. I've shelved it as 'fantasy' because it certainly doesn't have the hard and fast rules that, by and large, I expect to see in science fiction, although it is a bit of both.
I enjoyed it quite a lot. It's not hard to read, though the emotional themes are perhaps not for all children. I would have enjoyed it as a child, but I read 1984 at about the age of nine, and if that didn't psychologically damage me... It's told from the point of view of a person who, inside the artificially created and regulated community, slowly becomes aware that, for all their apparent order, they've lost a lot of things that one might consider more important -- true feelings like love, and things like art and music, even the ability to see in colour. He finds that things he used to regard without any real emotion basically add up to unnecessary murder. His world view is completely altered, and he -- and his mentor, who is the Giver -- decide to go against the years of tradition and try to give back to the people the things that they gave up in return for order.
The book does not tell you how that works out, following the main character away from that place. I like the ending, the way it leaves so much to the imagination, and I don't want to read the other books to find out exactly what happens. I want Schrodinger's cat both alive and dead.
