Book Review: ‘The Giver’ by Lois Lowry

The Giver by Lois Lowry is a children’s dystopian novel with surprisingly mature themes that can be both enjoyed and analysed by people of all ages.

The story follows twelve year old Jonas and his carefully structured community. At the Ceremony of the Twelve Jonas is selected to become the next Receiver of Memory where he will be expected to hold all memories of the past within himself in order to spare the rest of the community the burden of knowing. As Jonas learns about the beauty of colours, the pain of past suffering, and the horror of what being ‘released’ from the community actually means, he and his mentor The Giver decide to open everyone’s eyes to the truth.

The book contains an afterword by Lowry where she describes her intention for The Giver to simply create a storybook for children about the importance of memory. The creation of what became a totalitarian society was an accidental by-product of that original idea.

Despite the subject matter The Giver does match with what I would expect from a children’s book. There is a young protagonist on the cusp of starting the next stage of his life. There are plenty of lessons and teaching moments for Jonas. There is a coming of age journey as Jonas moves from accepting everything around him to questioning its true nature. The novel also features a lot of ‘telling’ rather than ‘showing’ as different parts of this society’s structure are explained to the reader – who in this case Lowry planned to be a younger audience who would likely find the story more accessible if the world within it was described in a clear-to-understand yet interesting way.

For me the most fascinating part of the novel was not how Jonas’s community was structured but rather the response of the people living inside it. As readers we can see the controlling structure of this society – how every age group and every aspect of life is carefully balanced and regimented for both optimal efficiency and sameness. We know that what we are reading about is a dystopian culture however to the characters living inside this world, to whom this curated structure is all they have ever known, their society is a utopia. It is only when Jonas sees colours and is given memories of a distant past that has been erased from the minds of the rest of the population that he understands that there is a different, freer way they could live.

The majority of the novel has a calm pace to the storytelling which matches the control with the community. The pacing in the final couple of chapters is frantic, much like Jonas’ dash through the snow when he leaves home. The trouble is that the story moves so fast I struggle to know what is happened and where. It’s a shame since I really enjoyed the novel up until this very last section.

Apart from this frenetic ending, The Giver is for me a near perfect dystopian novel with a complex yet easy to understand society. Its shorter length means that it is a great introductory point for someone wanting to give this science fiction sub-genre a try.

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