She imagined a society where the past was deliberately forgotten, which would allow the inhabitants to live in a kind of peaceful ignorance. The flaws inherent in such a society, she realized, would show the value of individual and community memory: although a loss of memory might mean a loss of pain, it also means a loss of lasting human relationships and connections with the past.
The society Lowry depicts in The Giver is a utopian society—a perfect world as envisioned by its creators. It has eliminated fear, pain, hunger, illness, conflict, and hatred—all things that most of us would like to eliminate in our own society. But in order to maintain the peace and order of their society, the citizens of the community in The Giver have to submit to strict rules governing their behavior, their relationships, and even their language.
Individual freedom and human passions add a chaotic element to society, and in The Giver even the memory of freedom and passion, along with the pain and conflict that human choice and emotion often cause, must be suppressed. In effect, the inhabitants of the society, though they are happy and peaceful, also lack the basic freedoms and pleasures that our own society values.
In these novels, societies that might seem to be perfect because all the inhabitants are well fed or healthy or seemingly happy are revealed to be profoundly flawed because they limit the intellectual or emotional freedom of the individual. I hope they liked them! My first book A Summer to Die was a fictionalized account of the death of my sister when we were young.
The most touching response was from a family who, after they lost their year-old son, copied and framed a passage from that book—words that they found comforting. Controversy after blowout: School district 'saddened beyond words'. Highlights: Every touchdown in the Mater Dei win over St. John Bosco. Arch Manning's Alabama visit draws rave reviews. Lois Lowry. Related News. Clearly there'd be no plot or importance to the book if it was just, Oh, it's a nice world, here's how it works.
So I had to introduce the underbelly and suddenly it was dystopian. You do that so subtly, everything seems perfect and idyllic, and suddenly you get hints that not everything is so great. I think the first hint that all is not well there is when they hold the ceremony recounting the childhood of each child who comes to the stage. They're recounting with laughter the childhood of Asher, laughing about how he mispronounced a word when he was little and they had to, what, whip him, was that it?
And suddenly you're jolted, or you should be, that all is not right in this place even though everyone is very accepting that that's the way it is. Your use of color, or lack of color, in The Giver is really powerful. The reading experience kind of parallels that world—you don't know you don't have color in the book, and suddenly you see it and realize you've been living in that world just like they are, without even knowing. You know, it was very difficult, once I decided to do it, to make a book devoid of color.
It was very hard not to reference color at all. A kind of silly mistake that an editor caught when I turned the manuscript in was the first scene where he sees color—it's an apple that they're throwing back and forth, and originally it was a ball. It seemed logical for two boys to go out and throw a ball back and forth.
The editor wrote a note saying, "Why would they be manufacturing a ball, would they have dye, or paint? When Jonas does see color it's only in natural objects, like first an apple and then flowers and hair, so nothing is manufactured. So, I wish I had a chance to redo that.
But oddly enough that reminds me of another place, and this is in the fourth book. The girl, Claire, is in a place where the birth mothers live. And in writing about that, I thought, this is going to be so boring. They're in this building.
What do they do? There's no books, there's no music But you opened it up with the mask! Sort of like Hannibal Lechter. What's the experience been like to have had such a frequently challenged book?
I do not remember the first time that it happened but it must have surprised me. Except that, going back further— Anastasia Krupnik had been challenged, specifically for one thing, it has the word shit in it.
If it had been 10 years later the editor would have told me not to put that in, it would have been easy not to, but it was published in '79, it was written in ' Somehow things were a little more relaxed then. We had a Democratic president, Jimmy Carter, and after him when the government became more conservative, that's when the challenges and censorship started.
That book was challenged more than once and removed from the hands of children. So I was not new to challenges and censorship, but of course it took a whole different form with The Giver , and it continues to this day. I have a feeling that those two incidents are not the real reason, but they're something that people grasp onto. I think it's a book that makes some perhaps very conservative parents uncomfortable because it's a book challenging the authority set down by the government, the parents, the older people.
I was so suspicious of when Jonas left because it seemed so easy, but on the other hand, there's no reason in the world to expect that anyone would want to get away from this world.
It's the perfect expression of what it is. Jen: When you talk about that courage and bravery, how do you think the characters of Jonas or Rosemary compare to future characters—Harry Potter, Katniss Everdeen? Kate: In The Hunger Games , the point is survival and the act of escape. This is the realization and the sacrifice, it's almost skipping all the excitement. It's not an adventure. Jen: Do you think that The Giver has informed those books?
Kate: It would have to have, I think. Kids are capable of acting selfishly. It is of greater merit that what motivates Jonas is saving this child, Gabe. When Katniss has to save her sister We're all capable of being selfish, but the point at which going through horrible things makes more sense, especially in books, is when characters are allowed to be noble in sacrifice.
We'd all like to think we'd be noble if the circumstances demanded it. That's what saves this book if he fails; he died for something that he couldn't have stood to the side on. Jen: What did you want more of? Kate: I wish we could have seen the world after he leaves.
I wish we'd heard more about what happened when Rosemary died, not because it's a flaw in storytelling, but because the macabre part of me wants to know. We'd get to see and could hope that he did make a difference. I hope in the next books, we'll get some sense of what happened when he left.
I want to know how widespread it is, this "Sameness"—are there other communities where there is music and color, and what happens next? Jen: This book is almost 20 years old. Do you think it could have come out this year and been so successful?
Kate: I couldn't put it down. I read it in one sitting; I got two pages in and moved my towel under the umbrella and finished it there. It's so lean, the pacing is so good, and it's brutal and unrelenting and all those words that sound like movie blurbs.
It lacks the romance or the humor or anything that would be that spoonful of sugar, but that's a testament to how perfect a piece of storytelling it is. There's all this wonderful realism, no one is having normal reactions, but the humanity comes though. We get the [ Harry Potter -esque] Sorting but it's scary.
Jen: Do you think it's similar to any other kids or Y. Kate: I thought of The City of Ember , they have those same sorts of traditions that no one really knows where they came from. It was unclear how much the elders believe in The Giver. It's so engrained, this has been going on so long. And there's genuine affection—these scary people are scary in a totally different way than, say, [the self-interested, power-hungry] President Snow in The Hunger Games —for them, it's coming from a good place.
Something that makes it so powerful is the idea that, even with the best intentions in the world, when you try to stop conflict by trying to make everyone the same you lose all the voices and music and books. The idea of going to Sameness and stopping people from being able to see colors is probably most similar to Fahrenheit , with Bradbury's rants against political correctness.
I think in some ways the Chaos Walking series also puts you thorough the ringer and doesn't give you an easy answer, but those books are pages They're lean and brutal and a world you can imagine being in, and they're not easy in the end.
Whoever reads them will not be able to stop thinking about them. Jen: How has reading it made you feel about your own work? Kate: I feel like what I'm going to be doing as a writer next is asking, How do I tell a story that lean and crisp and perfect?
And as a bookseller, I'm thinking, I have to get this in the hands of everybody who comes in having read The Hunger Games. Kate: The really beautiful thing, I loved that it hit me all of a sudden, was the removal of color.
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