In journals this year, my students wrote how they couldn't wait to read the next chapter and how this was the first book to make them weep. But after they read The Giver's ambiguous ending, they all wanted more. Now, with Son, the story begun in The Giver comes full-circle.
Between The Giver (published 1993) and Son (2020), Lowry widened that circle considerably with Gathering Blue (2000) and Messenger (2004). These novels comprising The Giver Quartet introduce young characters with compelling challenges in communities "elsewhere," far from the one in The Giver. Different as the communities are, they complement each other in significant ways.
But rising above the quasi-medieval village is a municipal building that survives from a cataclysm ages before. There, the ruling tribunal takes interest in Kira's gift for weaving. She admits that she doesn't understand how she makes designs that her mother never taught her; her fingers seem to move on their own accord. The tribunal commissions her to repair a ceremonial robe to be worn at the community's annual "gathering." The copious robe's elaborate woven designs depict a cycle of war and renewal that includes an episode of skyscrapers toppled by flame from the sky. (I immediately checked the date: Gathering Blue precedes 9/11 by a year).
With servants, electricity, hot baths, and Thomas the wood-carver for a friend, Kira lives like a princess, but not happily ever after. Lowry raises questions that keep us reading with increasing dread. Who in the palace is singing and sobbing in the night? When the repairs are done, what do the elders expect Kira to make from a large portion of the robe that remains blank? About the old woman in the forest who teaches Kira to make every color of dye -- lacking only blue -- how can the crone say there are no beasts? At the gathering, when the community's revered Singer wears that robe and chants the long history of the people, what is the scraping metallic sound that Kira hears? Of all the questions, that's the one that drove me crazy with wonder, especially when I read at the end of chapter twenty, "Suddenly, Kira realized with horror what the sound was." But Lowry keeps us in suspense.
Kira's guide through the forest is a filthy but chipper young boy named Matty, accompanied always by his crooked-tail dog Branch, devoted to the boy who rescued him. When Matty goes to a distant village for the blue dye that Kira needs, he brings back a surprise that turns Kira's story upside-down. Then, like Jonas, she knows that she must act to bring about change in her community.
Orphaned at the end of Gathering Blue, Matty is adopted by a blind man in that distant village, a community that welcomes newcomers who have been rejected elsewhere for their differences or disabilities. But there's discontent among a growing number of villagers, customers of an outsider they call Trademaster. Some of them have put forth a proposal for a referendum on closing the community. Matty's formerly kind-hearted neighbors rise to say
We need all the fish for ourselves.Before long, they're building a wall. Matty now has an urgent mission to bring Kira from the village of his birth to his adoptive village before they close it off. But the forest is no longer the welcoming place he has traversed many times before: the forest has "thickened," becoming a manifestation of the malevolence that has taken over the village.
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. (72)
Like Jonas and Kira, Matty also has a gift, but I can't say more without spoiling surprises that sometimes hurt, sometimes delight. Of the latter kind, there's a new dog named "Frolic" and a frog whose re-appearance gives hope during an intensely grim scene.
For its first part, Son is a kind of detective story as Claire follows leads to find out the sex of the baby, then his location, then his name. By stealth, she bonds with her son during a time when the family of Jonas is fostering the toddler. When Jonas takes the boy away, as described in the final chapters of The Giver, Claire sets off in pursuit.
In the second part, we're in a different kind of novel, a sort of medieval romance for damaged people. Her quest takes her by boat to a remote sea-side village at the foot of an immense cliff. She settles awhile, helper to an elder woman. Amnesia is involved. When Claire recovers, she resolves to climb the rock face of that looming cliff, her best way to find Gabe. With no "gift" of the kinds that help Jonas, Kira, and Matty to their goals, Claire succeeds by grit and muscle, trained by Einar, a young man deeply scarred by his father's abuse and maimed by his own climb up the mountain face -- or, rather, by what happened after he successfully reached his goal.
Einar has trouble giving love or receiving it, but he's the heart of an anti-romance at the core of this book. One cold night, frustrated by how he has trained her "relentlessly," Claire realizes "his gaze was also that of someone who loved her" (176). Thinking of a young couple in the village, Claire "thought sadly of Einar, alone in his hillside hut, and knew that a part of life was passing both of them by." Einar puts years of effort into preparing Claire for the ordeal of her climb and for leaving him. Claire, like Einar, pays a terrible price for success, ensuring that she will see Gabe, but only from afar.
Gabe, all this while, has longed for the mother he dimly remembers. In the final portion of the novel, he confronts a malevolent entity for the life of Claire. Again, there are meaningful surprises that I must not spoil.
So the communities of these novels are characters too, each one in denial of a part of themselves. We can imagine that each separate community has made its own defensive response to the all-but-forgotten cataclysm that fractured the world. So Jonas's community elevated reason, forgot the stories of the past with all their passions and violence, but suppressed the feelings that make life worth living. Kira's community elevates strength and relegates artists to a golden cage. Matty's village, where empathy and respect are on full display, is blind-sided when jealousy, lust, greed, and resentment, long suppressed, rise to the surface. Gabe faces the embodiment of those feelings in the final chapters of Son.
I feel resonance between these stories and my experience. Like Jonas and Claire in their village, I miss depth between internet and errands and diversions. Like Matty, I was blind-sided by January 6, though we've seen that side of us growing at least since the Oklahoma City Bombing. The recent flap over what we teach in history class has exposed just how little history we've learned in schools for generations.
In the years since the first book in 1993, Lowry has leaned more and more into a kind of mystical vision. The Giver transfers memory to Jonas through touch. Kira's fingers weave scenes from far away, as if she's clairvoyant. Matty's hands bring healing. Gabe has a gift he calls "veering," suddenly inhabiting another's consciousness. While these all appear magical, they can also be seen as speeded-up versions of literacy, imagination, care, and empathy, traits all within the grasp of the reader.
There's even a real-world framework for examples of the magic we see in the Quartet in the theories of 20th century psychologist Karl Jung. He posits a "collective unconscious" of memories, accounting for the recurrence of stories and symbols in mythologies and even in personal dreams across the globe, across history. One of those universal stories is a journey that requires a hero's pain and sacrifice to attain what's missing. In this collective unconscious, there is a drive towards a reconciliation of our selves -- communities as well as individuals -- with the shadow sides that we suppress.
Lowry's characters could be seen as tapping into that collective unconscious on their own heroes' journeys to bring wholeness to their communities. The final confrontation in Son comes close to being an allegorical struggle with the community's collective shadow side. While Lowry may not have had Jung in mind, his vision is compatible with hers.
Always on the lookout for religion, I was struck by how little it matters in these books. In Gathering Blue, villagers bow to an ancient cross without any knowledge of what it might have once meant. In Son, an ancient book fascinates Gabe with many images of a mother and infant son, i.e. Mary and Jesus. "The Trademaster" trades what the villagers desire for what they most prize about themselves, i.e., surrendering their souls. In Christian tradition, Jesus trades his own life to redeem humanity from captivity to "the master of this world," i.e., Satan. Something like that happens in these books, but the link to Christian tradition is not explicit, and, as Jung would point out, the pattern is found in the myths of other cultures.
I lay The Giver Quartet aside, knowing that, now retired, I won't be revisiting Jonas and his world again anytime soon, if ever. Few novels have ever taken me to such "unspeakably sad" moments as these, nor rewarded me with more hopeful visions of what's possible with courage and imagination.
No comments:
Post a Comment