Messenger by Lois Lowry
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Allegory, Eucatastrophe, and Unanswered Questions "Ah hah!" thought I after getting a few chapters into Messenger (2004), when the third book in Lois Lowry's Giver Quartet finally starts making the quartet a quartet in story as well as theme. Messenger shares characters with its isolated predecessors, Jonas from The Giver (1993) and Kira from Gathering Blue (2000) and makes clear that each of the three stories takes place in the same post-apocalypse world of scattered communities that have responded to starting over differently: enforced sameness and suppression of emotion (The Giver), desperate poverty and brutal competition (Gathering Blue), or acceptance of Others and group harmony (Messenger). Each novel features a young protagonist with a special gift and hence a special destiny for their society. Hints in Messenger retroactively make the earlier books' ambiguous endings happier. . . Messenger is Matty's story: the little boy who in Gathering Blue is called Matt and has "a dirty face and a mischievous spirit" and boasts that he is "the fiercest of the fierce" and finally brings to Kira both woad and her blind father. At the end of that second book Kira decides to stay in her village to try to improve it, while Matt moves to the blind man's community. Now 14-15, "no longer a boy, but not yet a man," Matty has been living for six years with the blind man, who's called Seer. When people reach a certain age in Village, they receive new names that confirm their roles, and Matty is hoping to some day be called Messenger. He loves carrying messages (telephones being a lost technology), especially when his missions take him through Forest, with which he believes he has a special relationship. Although Village has been a eutopia where everybody has work and food and homes and everyone welcomes and helps everyone else (especially refugees and people with disabilities), a cancer has been eating Village. Some years ago a tall, dark-haired, accent-voiced stranger called Trade Master started visiting Village to run Trade Mart, where the adult villagers trade away aspects of their personalities for tawdry and transient desires like handsomeness or a sewing machine. And as more people have been trading more of themselves, Village has been losing its harmony. Mentor (the formerly kind and literary schoolteacher) is leading a movement to close Village to outsiders and to build a big wall around it (ala Trump?). Thus Seer's daughter, Kira, may not be able to move there. (One wonders why Seer, who has deep insight into things, and Leader, who sees beyond, haven't noticed the harmful influence of Trade Mart and banned Trade Master--unless their obtuseness is necessary for Lowry's plot.). Not coincidentally, Forest has begun choking people to death with vines, and though Matty feels sure he and Forest are fine, we may worry about him. For Matty is most likeable! Jonas in The Giver and Kira in Gathering Blue are fine protagonists, but Matty has another level of appeal. His conversations with the wise Seer often take a humorous turn, as when the blind man says that if Kira doesn't come soon, "I'll never see her again," and Matty points out, "You can't see her anyway." When Seer says, "I see with my heart," sensitive Matty regrets his obtuse comment. Although he's often comically frank, Matty also lies now and then (something not done in Village), a remnant of his hard, hustling boyhood in Kira's village. He finds cooking "a bother," despite Seer patiently trying to get him to smell and taste the virtues of chopped and sauteed onions. Matty is tired of reading Moby-Dick and wants a gaming machine like the one his friend Ramon's family traded for at Trade Mart. He loves Seer, Jean (the daughter of Mentor), Frolic (the dog Jean gives him), Kira, and Leader. Matty is a charming and real adolescent boy. So I don't mind Matty's special gift, healing creatures by laying hands on them, feeling a lightning-like connection, and willing them to be better. He discovered his ability when he held a mutilated frog, felt it die, and healed it back to wholeness and life. His gift terrifies him. Using it is painful and leaves him sick and makes him feel different, and he is unsure what it is, what it means, why it came to him, and what he should do with it. Leader tells Matty, "Don't waste your gift," while Kira refuses to let him heal her crippled leg because it's her. Unlike in the first two Quartet books, in this one Lowry writes scary violent action (through Forest) and transcendent and romantic fantasy ("in the place called Beyond, Leader's consciousness met Kira's and they curled around each other like wisps of smoke in greeting"). As with the first two books, she is uninterested in explaining the fantastic elements of her story. Who is Trade Master? Where is he from? What is his goal? Where does he get his machines and fur coats? How can he take someone's love of poetry and make them younger? What is the source of the gifts of Jonas (seeing beyond), Kira (seeing ahead), and Matty (healing)? What makes the sentient malevolence of Forest? Is this novel science fiction or fantasy? Actually, it is an allegory, as in Seer's idea that, "Forest is an illusion, a tangled knot of fears and deceits and dark struggles for power." Allegorically, the novel shows that we tend to exchange what is important and makes us happy for what dehumanizes and sickens us. And that "Our gifts are our [non-violent] weaponry." Especially in its sublime, poignant conclusion (no ambiguity this time), Messenger is (so far) the most overtly Christian allegory of the Quartet. David Morse is the perfect reader for the audiobook; his voice is scratchy, wise, and compassionate. And the ending is accompanied by beautiful, uncanny music just right for the devastating and exhilarating eucatastrophe. If you've read the first two books of the Quartet you should read this one, which links them and looks forward to the fourth. I do hope the last book will answer some of the questions raised by this one. View all my reviews
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Gathering Blue by Lois Lowry
My rating: 3 of 5 stars An Absorbing, Finally Disappointing Look at the YA Artist Kira has just completed the four-day wake in the Field of Leaving to help her mother's spirit leave the world. Because her mother died of sickness, their 'cott' was burnt down. Thus, because Kira's father died hunting before she was born, Kira is now a homeless orphan. And because she was born with a twisted leg and she's only an adolescent, she'll be hard-pressed to survive in her primitive-medieval post-apocalypse village. Indeed, a group of women led by the scarred and scary Vandara wants Kira's land, and when the girl protests, she's nearly stoned. (The women believe Kira should have been exposed at birth as a cripple.) Kira saves herself by invoking the right to have the dispute settled by the Council of Guardians. Having plans for her uncanny skill at combining colored threads into designs, the Guardians decide to move Kira into their Council Edifice. . . Lois Lowry's young adult novel Gathering Blue (2000) is the second book in her Giver Quartet, the first being her Newbery-winning The Giver (1993). The Giver is a high-tech dystopia in which the people living in the community have traded away differences, history, and deep emotions for homogeneity, peace, and safety. Because The Giver is so affecting, when I started Gathering Blue I was surprised by its seeming lack of connection to its predecessor. They share no characters, and their settings differ, for Kira's post-apocalypse society is centered on remembering rather than forgetting the terrible past and is low tech--there's no plumbing outside the Council Edifice and the mostly illiterate people live a hand to mouth existence based on female agriculture and male spear hunting. Nevertheless, both books make a set because they feature young protagonists whose special gifts destine them for special roles in their societies and because their societies are dystopias that repress or control their people through systematic ignorance or false beliefs. Kira's life takes an unexpected turn when she starts living in the Council Edifice. She finds a friend in a boy about her age called Thomas who is a gifted wood carver. She learns from a wonderful old woman to make dyes from plants and flowers--all colors but blue, for her village lacks the necessary woad. She gets her first job, repairing the Singer's robe, which is embroidered with scenes from the violent history of humanity culminating in the fiery Ruin that destroyed civilization and left scattered settlements. The novel explores the roles of the artist in entertaining people, maintaining traditions, and creating the future, sometimes as those roles conflict with the need for the artist to express his/her own personal creativity. Lowry's writing is limpid and concise. She depicts believable and sympathetic young characters. Kira is brave, bright, and sensitive, and inspiring when she remembers her mother's loving advice: 'Take pride in your pain. You are stronger than those who have none.' Kira's best friend Matt is an 8-9 year old dirty, lousy, cocky, funny poor boy with an abusive mother and a spicy dialect (gifty, pocky, horrid far, etc.). Lowry fleshes out her post-apocalypse world via language ('cotts' are huts, 'tykes' kids, 'hubbys' husbands, and 'artist' is an unused word), names (infants have one-syllable names, post-pubescents like Kira two-syllable ones, adults three, and old people four), and irony (the villagers don't know that the Council Edifice is a former church or that Bogota and Baltimore are names of pre-Ruin cities). I think, however, that Lowry writes more believable main characters than completely convincing future societies. In The Giver, although the transmission by touch of memories from the Giver to the Receiver is vivid and affecting, she doesn't explain the technology behind removing historical memories from the people and placing them all in the Giver/Receiver pair. In Gathering Blue, life in Kira's post-apocalypse village feels real, but Lowry never explains the hot running water in the Council Edifice or the policy to prevent villagers from learning the truth about the terrible beasts in the woods or the nature of Kira's ability to receive messages from her thread designs. Lowry avoids some typical YA story developments. No romantic triangles! And no violent action scenes, unlike, say, The Hunger Games (Kira is no Katniss), or even The Giver movie (which features an absurd chase scene near the climax). And she likes ambiguous, thought-provoking endings. The perfect ending of The Giver leaves open whether Jonas and the baby Gabriel he escapes with from his community die of cold and hunger or find a better place to live. But--for this reader--in Gathering Blue she leaves too much unresolved, unlikely, and unlikeable. Kira finally makes a choice I can respect, but given the circumstances not one I can believe that she'd be saintly enough to make or that would turn out well, despite some hopeful shoots of woad. The reader of the audiobook, Catherine Borowitz, enhances the story in all the right ways with her compassionate and clear voice. People who like The Giver should like Gathering Blue, but although it has more humor and is more poignant than its more famous predecessor, it's also less perfect and thought-provoking. View all my reviews |
Jefferson Peters
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