The Messenger

Village and What It Was Built to Be

Village is the utopia that the Giver Quartet allows itself — briefly. It is a community that was founded specifically to welcome people that other communities had rejected: the wounded, the outcast, the different. The Seer — the blind man from Gathering Blue who is the village’s moral leader — came there. Jonas came there from the Community. The entire population is composed of people who were not wanted elsewhere, and the community has been built around the principle that this is the condition that unites them and the commitment that defines them.

Matty arrived at Village as a boy with a difficult past — he was a thief and a liar in the brutal village of Gathering Blue — and has grown into a young man of genuine moral seriousness. He has discovered a gift he does not fully understand: the ability to heal others, which costs him something he cannot precisely identify. He carries messages between Village and the surrounding communities, which is how he has earned his provisional name. The name he truly wants — Leader — is still withheld, because Lowry’s universe takes naming seriously: you receive the name you have earned.

The Vote to Close the Gates

The novel’s central event is a vote. Village — which has never turned anyone away — decides to hold a referendum on whether to close itself to new arrivals. The arguments made for closure are recognizable: the village has limited resources, the new arrivals have been more difficult than the original settlers, the quality of life for established residents is declining. These are not dishonest arguments. They are the arguments that communities have always made when they decide that the principle on which they were founded is no longer sustainable. Lowry does not caricature the voters who favor closure; she shows how ordinary people, motivated by ordinary concerns about their ordinary lives, arrive at a decision that destroys what made their community worth having.

The forest that surrounds Village begins to change in concert with the community’s internal change. Paths that were passable become dangerous. Trees resist movement. Something in the forest is alive and hostile in a way it was not before. This is The Messenger’s most allegorical device: the external world as mirror of the moral interior. A community that is closing itself off generates a hostility in its environment that reflects its own. The device works as allegory even if it operates at the novel’s surface level in a way that is somewhat more literal than Lowry’s best work.

The Cost of the Resolution

The novel’s ending is its most debated element. Matty uses his healing gift — spending it entirely, at the cost that spending it entirely implies — to restore the forest and, by implication, to restore Village’s openness. The sacrifice is his choice, freely made, and Lowry is careful to insist on this. But some readers have found the ending more emotionally costly than earned — the sacrifice is real and the loss is real, and the restoration it achieves does not fully account for the weight of what was given.

This is, in a sense, the honest condition of allegorical literature: the argument is clear, the mechanism is clean, but the human cost of the clean mechanism is harder to reconcile than the clean mechanism implies. The Messenger is Lowry at her most explicit and, in places, her most schematic. It is also a sincere and serious examination of a phenomenon — the community that destroys its founding principle in the name of preserving what the principle created — that has never been more relevant than it is now.

Our rating: 4.0/5 — The most allegorical novel in the Giver Quartet and the most direct in its political argument: a short, honest examination of how open communities close themselves, and what the refusal to close yourself costs.