The Giver by Lois Lowry

I just finished reading The Giver by Lois Lowry, an award winning novel for children about a community in the future where everything is perfect and orderly. There are Rules, lots of them, but these Rules are followed to the letter by all the citizens, young and old. It's a community of innocence and obedience; there are no memories of the past, and nobody knows (or needs to know) what's outside the community, in the place known only as Elsewhere. Everything is organized and structured, each adult has a single job to do, and each child is taught from an early age the importance of Precision of Language (for instance, to say "I'm starving" is clearly wrong; one must say "I'm hungry," or else be gently chastised by the Elders).

It's a good job everything's so perfect and organized too, because what kind of life would it be if meals weren't delivered to each family dwelling three times a day? If boys and girls didn't receive their life's Assignment at the age of Twelve? If adults were allowed to choose their own spouses and have as many children as they wanted?

But how does a community manage for so long to avoid making the kind of mistakes that might pop their bubble of perfection? Poverty, unrest, greed, crime, and all that bad stuff? Well, that only happens when people get ideas in their heads. Give them a taste of pleasure, for instance, and they start wanting more. That's why each person over the age of eleven or twelve must take The Pills each morning throughout their lives, to avoid The Stirring. And everything else, every other kind of temptation, is simply withheld. No one can desire what they don't know about.

The Elders have the system sown up so tight that even they don't have any desires or needs other than what the sysytem allows. But they have to get their infinite wisdom from somewhere, to avoid deviating from the path... and they get it from a man known as The Receiver, who stores all the memories of the world in his poor old head. There can be only one Receiver, and as a boy named Jonas is selected to take over from the old man, he must receive all the memories from him -- which makes the old man The Giver for the duration (hence the title of the novel).

It's a really nice read, gripping and intriguing, and quite dark for a children's book. A couple of scenes in particular stand out as pretty disturbing. But what disturbs me most is how familiar some of the elements of this book are to my own story, Island of Fog.

In The Giver, we have Elsewhere, that place beyond, where no one ever goes. In Island of Fog, I also have Elsewhere, as well as Out There -- two different places. In The Giver we have a twelve year old boy as the main character, and he is brought up in a community with defined boundaries -- just like Hal in Island of Fog. In The Giver, the boys and girls are assigned varying tasks, which they must undertake for the rest of their lives -- as in Island of Fog (although this is a part I haven't written yet). In both novels there is an air of mystery and a veil of secrecy, and the idea that there's something else beyond the boundaries of the place they've grown up in.

I didn't copy any of these ideas, but of course some of them are not that new anyway. The Giver is reminiscent of Logan's Run and other movies, and I guess many other books follow the same kind of theme.

But since The Giver is so popular at the moment, I suppose I'd better alter at least the name of Elsewhere. Maybe call it Not Here instead...