At first things seem pleasant enough.Life, however, lacks color and music.It lacks emotional engagement.Those who, in real life, idealize the 1950s as before the madness of the sixties began, have trouble conceiving of how societies go wrong.The dilemma is that no society is perfect and as time goes on we look for improvements.For a very long time in American history, for example, nobody had bosses.The majority of people were independent farmers.They prospered by luck and hard work, but they worked for no one but themselves.Now we mostly work for bosses who have bosses who have bosses in some kind of endless regression of power.Our ability to change things is quite limited, even in professional positions.Is this better than the uncertainty of farming?With all the rain this year it might seem so. Of such things dystopias are made.
The Giver follows a protagonist, Jonas, who when he becomes twelve is assigned to become the new Receiver.As he gains memories of how things used to be, he’s fascinated.Learning his society’s darkest secret, however, spurs him to try to make a change. A lot of questions remain at the end. (The novel is part of a series, as most young adult fiction tends to be, but it can be read as a stand-alone story.)Those of us who’ve been around the block a time or two might be able to guess where this is going, but for younger readers to be introduced into the way of human problem solving this is a gloves-off approach.Those accustomed to dystopias will find themselves in familiar territory.As will those who live under Republican regimes.