The Giver ~

Devastation in simplicity. 

Those are the words I was left with as the book finished, and I stayed with it's deeply disturbing aftermath. 

Dystopian Young Adult literature is a whole genre by itself. But to put this book in that category (as publishers are wont to do), would be an injustice. Here is something which can be read (with increasing disquiet) by any adult. And more one thinks about it, more one uncovers layers. 

Here is an utopian world, where there is order, safety, serenity. Everybody knows the mission of their life, the work they will need to do to maintain the equanimity of a society obsessed with balance. But hidden within this serenity, there is also the raw truth of the price man pays to get these. The grey tones, the regimentation and the ruthlessness, which accompanies the intrinsic nature of this society. 

And then there is one boy, Jonas, a Receiver, who is chosen to be the one who will receive all memories, without bar, of myriad generations of people from a Giver, who is himself one of a line of people who continue to be the repository of all possible memories. 

The inflection point comes when Jonas learns of a world which has passed but of which he knew nothing of - and the changes it wroughts in him. And what he does with the truths which cripple his very soul.

Recently I had written on the persistence of memory, and the pleasure and pain it can give. The Giver talks about what it would mean if there was no memory, and if a person is suddenly confronted with the accumulation of a hundred generations of it, at the same time. 

On another level, the story talks about the choices we as societies make, easily making severe moral sacrifices for a seemingly larger good. The devastation is in it's normality.

The book juxtaposes plastic happiness with the despairing tenderness of the bond a boy forms for a child; of the despair of knowing but not being able to share; of how eliminating pain is never an answer to achieve happiness; of how loss is as important as love; of how not-knowing is a right of choice and not of compulsion. 

I left the book, deeply unnerved, and looked for every colour I could identify, letting my skin know the warmth of touch and the coldness of a rainy icy day. I let myself get angry, get emotional, get hugged. I might die tonight - but not before I have Received everything life has to Give.