(part 3 of 4) 1994: THE GIVER by Lois Lowry
For the first time, he heard something that he knew to be music. He heard people singing.
If you've read The Giver, you know that the ending is infamously vague. Jonas and baby Gabriel flee the community on a stolen bicycle, run out of food and resources, and, starving and cold, make it to the top of a snowy hill, from which Jonas can see another community. He also, critically, finds a sled, just like the one in the first memory he received from the Giver, and the two of them begin to ride downhill towards the lights.
That's where the book ends. We don't know if Jonas and Gabriel made it, we don't know what was in the new community, we don't know if the old community ever hunts them down, we don't know anything else about the rest of the world that Jonas is about to discover. This was, of course, by design; Lowry has been very upfront that she "had left the ending ambiguous on purpose; I liked the mystery of it, the opportunity for the reader to ponder and decide." She's shared some of her favorite interpretations of the ending that she's heard from child readers who wrote in to her, and there are a lot: maybe the lights really are a new and better and more loving community than Jonas' old home. Maybe it's our world. Maybe it's Jonas' old community but somehow it's already changed. Or maybe Jonas was freezing to death and hallucinating right before he blacked out for good. That's a beautiful thing about art: you don't have to directly lay out everything, we all get to interpret and take away different things. And in the case of The Giver - a novel where Lowry is very deliberate about what she does and doesn't reveal - we have to, because of that ambiguous ending. We'll never know what happens after that final sled ride, we all get to imagine it but we'll never read the words for sure.
However, as I recently learned, Lowry has written three sequels to The Giver.
Gathering Blue, published in 2000, was the second novel of Lowry’s “Giver Quartet”, and a national bestseller since it was the first followup to The Giver in seven years. That said, for about 99% of the novel, the relationship of the events of Gathering Blue to the events of The Giver is extremely unclear, and for the remaining one percent, the relationship is only mentioned in passing. Gathering Blue is less a direct sequel - although, as we later learn, the novel is set after the conclusion of The Giver - and more a very obvious thematic companion to The Giver. Both are dystopian novels, both involve a young person selected for a mysterious job, both include an elder who lives outside of the community and serves as a mentor for the protagonist, both include a lot of people dying for mysterious reasons that turn out to be pretty evil, both follow the young protagonists as they discover some of the more insidious parts of their society. More importantly, both books are great for the same reasons. Once again, Lowry’s writing is tight and brutal, creating a new dystopian world through slow incremental revelations, evoking atmospheres that you don’t often play with in children’s literature, like “dread” and “oppression”, and forcing her characters to struggle through that atmosphere to get to something better. I'm not going to summarize any of the sequels in detail, but Gathering Blue is absolutely something you will love if you loved The Giver.
However, the dystopian setting of Gathering Blue is completely different from that of The Giver; for one thing, it’s in color. The protagonist of Gathering Blue is Kira, living in a strange society reminiscent of medieval serfdom, one of the unwashed starving masses in the shadow of a cathedral and the powerful men who make decisions inside. This isn’t a place like Jonas’ community where the people in charge tried to fix everything; things are going very badly for most of the people in this society. It is, rest assured, still extremely weird: age is designated by the number of syllables in your name, fragments of Christian symbols are strewn about the city but nobody really seems to know what they mean, and the major annual ritual is a days-long song, sung by a soloist, detailing all of human history up through a mysterious event called the “Ruin”, which is never fully described but suggested to be a nuclear war and ensuing fallout. Kira is the lame daughter of an artisan weaver and dyer, and is recruited by the city leaders to contribute to the ritual song by repairing and re-weaving the singer’s robe. As with The Giver, Kira slowly learns that things are way darker than they initially seemed, and it becomes clear that she needs to start looking for a way out.
But towards the end of the novel, Kira is told about another place:
"'They were just people. But they are people like me, who were damaged. Who had been left to die.” “Who had been taken from our village to the Field?” Her father smiled. “Not only from here. There are other places. They had come from all over, those who had been wounded— sometimes not just in body, but in other ways as well…We have gardens. Houses. Families. But it is much quieter than this village. There is no arguing. People share what they have, and help each other. Babies rarely cry. Children are cherished.'”
There is a place out there, somewhere in the world, where the elders may not meet in a cathedral with a cross, but where broken people help and care for each other. And after a novel's worth of suspense and dread and mystery and constructing a new world, one that shares many themes with The Giver but is brilliant in its own right, we hear this:
"'...them other people— them broken ones? They gets married. And I seen a boy there, a two-syllable boy, not even broken, just about the same age as you. I bet you could marry him,' Matt announced in a solemn whisper, 'iffen you want to.'
Kira hugged him. 'Thanks, Matt,' she whispered back. 'I don’t want to.'
'His eyes be a very amazing blue,' Matt said importantly, as if it might matter."
A boy with a two-syllable name and amazing blue eyes. Is that Jonas? Did Jonas survive and make it to this new and loving community?
As Lowry confirms in the third Giver novel, yes he did. And as it turns out, that community is having some problems of its own.
Messenger, the third novel of the Giver quartet, is set in that mysterious ideal village. Jonas doesn't just live there, he runs the place:
"...the tall young man known as Leader looked down and watched the slow and cheerful pace of Village, of the people he loved, who had chosen him to rule and guard them. He had come here as a boy, finding his way with great difficulty. The Museum held the remains of a broken sled in a glass case, and the inscription explained that it had been Leader’s arrival vehicle. There were many relics of arrival in the Museum, because each person who had not been born in Village had his own story of coming there."
As you can tell, the naming conventions of this village, called Village, are extremely direct, and Messenger is the most heavily allegorical of the Giver novels. The people in Village are given "true names" like Mentor or Seer. Village is surrounded by Forest, the seemingly sentient woods protecting the inhabitants and guiding other exiles towards Village. But by the time Messenger starts, things are starting to deteriorate when a mysterious interloper starts visiting Village and helping the residents make all of their dreams come true, if they're willing to trade away "their deepest selves". And they do, for monetary gain or better looks, while their sense of selflessness, of duty to the refugees entering Village, erodes. As Jonas presides over a contentious town meeting, the residents vote to close Village off to all future newcomers:
"Some of those who had been among the most industrious, the kindest, and the most stalwart citizens of Village now went to the platform and shouted out their wish that the border be closed so that “we” (Matty shuddered at the use of “we”) would not have to share the resources anymore…We need all the fish for ourselves. Our school is not big enough to teach their children, too; only our own. They can’t even speak right. We can’t understand them. They have too many needs. We don’t want to take care of them. And finally: We’ve done it long enough."
In the second half of the novel, one of the young men in Village goes journeying through Forest to find one of his neighbor's children and bring her back to Village before the border closes, but Forest - the plants, the animals, the air - is gradually turning hostile and poisonous, as if Forest is having an immune system response to the new selfishness and hatred in Village. Meanwhile, the clock keeps ticking as Village begins to close the border:
"And suddenly Matty could see, too, crowds of people at the edge of Village. They were dragging huge logs. Someone—it looked like Mentor—was giving directions. They were preparing to build a wall."
I haven't mentioned this yet, but Lowry's Messenger, her novel about selfishness, about a once all-welcoming society deteriorating into hatred and xenophobia, about building a wall to keep the strangers out, about the environment deteriorating as Village splits into factions and rivals, was published in 2004.
The Giver, Gathering Blue, and Messenger, while they are all set in the same fictional universe, could each stand alone as novels. Even if you didn't know who Jonas had been, you could read any of the novels, really in any order, and find the overlap with Jonas' character a pleasant callback.
While the books aren't tightly related by plot or character, they are extremely tightly related by theme. All three books are about attempts to rebuild a society from the ground up, at some point in the distant future after something terrible has happened. And as it turns out, even if you're trying to avoid the mistakes of the past - maybe you try to give everyone a voice this time, or maybe you try to give nobody a voice this time, or maybe you literally engineer the colors out of the world to impose Sameness and head off problems of difference - there is nothing easy about keeping a community together. Lowry's three parables on what is, basically, the central task of humanity, are all masterfully written, and eight years after Messenger, she delivered one more Giver novel. And this one absolutely could not stand alone from the rest.
The first third of the 2012 novel Son is set in the same community from The Giver, concurrent to the events of The Giver. It's the story of Claire; you didn't meet Claire in The Giver, but she is baby Gabriel's mother, and the novel begins as a fourteen-year-old Claire gives birth to Gabriel while shackled and blindfolded in the community's birthing center.
Yeah, this one gets dark, even by Lowry's normal standards. The original The Giver did plenty to suggest that Jonas and Claire's community was a eugenics-fueled experiment in peacemaking gone horribly awry; Son builds that out more as we see the details of the unseen women assigned to be Birthmothers and segregated away from the rest of the community. Claire gets turfed out of the birthing center early in the novel due to complications with her pregnancy, and is able to track down her son, Gabriel in the nursery (where, if you remember from The Giver, Jonas' father has been giving him some extra attention). Claire is the only mother in the community who actually knows who her child is, and the only person in the community at all with any sort of maternal instinct1. When Gabriel gets slated for Release, she's understandably horrified and wants to save him, but things get a little more complicated when Jonas steals the baby and escapes the community for good - as we know from the end of The Giver - and the remaining two-thirds of Son chronicle Claire's years-long journey to find Gabriel again, through other, very different communities trying to hold themselves together.
I won't go into detail on how Son concludes, but it's a worthy ending for the quartet that started with one of the most influential Newbery winners of all time, an ending that ties together the loose threads of all four novels. Lowry's task across all four novels is nothing less than exploring, from every angle, how we're supposed to all live in the same place without destroying everything that's important to us. We, very obviously, still haven't figured that out, but if we can tell our children stories like this, there's a chance one of them will grow up and do better than we did.
Newburied is a series by Tony Ginocchio on the history of the Newbery Medal and a whole bunch of other stuff related to it. You can subscribe via Substack to get future installments sent to your inbox directly. This is the third of four installments on Lois Lowry's 1994 medalist, The Giver.
The reason for this is explained briefly in the book: due to an oversight, Claire never started taking the assigned Anti-Horny pills we first saw in The Giver. As a result, her body is still producing a normal hormonal output and she's experiencing what we would consider a natural maternal attachment, while her community would consider that aberrant.