A Certain Slant of Light

I haven’t seen The Giver movie and don’t really intend to - the poster strongly suggests to me that its producers don’t actually understand the book - but its existence has gotten me thinking about The Giver again, so in that sense I’m rather beholden to it.

One of the things that makes the book so powerful, I think, is that - at least to me, at age twelve - the society it depicts seems very seductive at the start. Everyone has plenty to eat and a pleasant house to live in. All the children are wanted and well-cared for in stable family units, with a whole raft of thoughtful child-care professionals who work hard to discover their natural abilities. Gender roles are clearly quite forgotten: Jonas’s mother is a Judge and his father is a Nurturer (that is, he looks after babies), and no one thinks anything of it.

In many ways, Jonas’s society looks like a better version of our own. It positions the reader differently than many dystopian novels do. Rather than looking down on an obviously flawed society and waiting (im)patiently for the hero to get with the program and start learning life lessons about Freedom, the reader (at least the young reader who is not genre-savvy about how dystopian novels) just like Jonas, starts out charmed by this society and lives, with Jonas, the journey from enchantment to disillusionment.

In a way, the society in The Giver is a totalitarian’s realized vision: not as it looks from the outside, or in hindsight, when the terrible parts are all too clear, but as it looks from the inside, to believers. And it’s easy to see how a vision that seductive can go so horribly wrong. After all, what price isn’t worth paying for a world where all children are loved and wanted and well-fed? It’s easy to see why so many ordinary people would find that dream seductive.

An orderly society where everyone has a place and knows it - not, in The Giver, because of anything as reactionary as right of bloodline, but because everyone has been assigned a place based on their carefully observed merits. Who can argue that their place in society is too low, when they’ve been placed there by their own genes? Everyone is placed, and everyone is efficient, productive, well-behaved, and content.

And in the end, the world will be so orderly that even love and death will lose their terror: they will be organized in neat ritualized boxes, just like everything else. They will be under human control.

***

Also, the memory-transmitting power is just super cool. I mean really, it's like reading except made flesh. The scene where Jonas gets the transmitted sled memory and he's all WHAT IS EVERYTHING is one of my favorite scenes ever.

There are a few books in the world that strike me as being simply perfect. I’ve already written about one, The Perilous Gard; and Lois Lowry’s Number the Stars is another.

I adore everything about this book. Even the cover is beautiful (at least on my book: they seem to have made it less stark in newer version, which I don’t approve).

And I love the heroine, of course: Annemarie Johansen, who seems like such an ordinary girl, but shows such reserves of bravery when the Nazis threaten her best friend. The strength of that friendship, which reflects the love that inspired the Danish Gentiles to spirit their Jewish neighbors to safety. (Almost all the Jews in Denmark were saved: an honor shared in occupied Europe only by Bulgaria.)

The way Lowry folds history into the narrative, so that Denmark’s principled resistance of German occupation feels real and vital. Sinking their own Navy so the Nazis couldn’t use it. The Danish Resistance, flitting through the margins of the story. Denmark’s King Christian X, riding his horse through Copenhagen, a silent reminder to his people to stay strong and unbroken by the occupation.

The king on his horse (for all that Annemarie comments he’s “not like fairy tale kings”) adds to the subtle fairy tale motif woven through the book. Annemarie’s little sister likes to hear fairy stories; Annemarie tells herself Little Red Riding Hood to keep her spirits up when she’s on an urgent mission - and runs into the Nazis right as she comes to the wolf.

This was the first really serious book I read on my own. It’s about bravery, and pride - not vainglorious pride, but basic human dignity - and having the strength and courage to keep that pride even when outside forces try to destroy it. The Danes have been conquered, the Jews are being hunted, and the Rosens have had to abandon everything to escape with their lives -

But their shoulders were as straight as they had been in the past: in the classroom, on the stage, at the Sabbath table. So there were other sources, too, of pride, and they had not left everything behind.