[ed. So, North Korea is in the news again, shrouded in mystery. If you've ever wondered what life might really be like there, pick up The Orphan Master's Son, it comes as close to anything I've ever read that answers that question (and won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction). Here's one review of the book: "I haven’t liked a new novel this much in years, and I want to share the simple pleasure of reading the book. But I also think it’s an instructive lesson in how to paint a fictional world against a background of fact: The secret is research. Johnson spent six years working on “The Orphan Master’s Son,” reading everything he could about North Korea, ingesting the oral histories of defectors and eventually visiting the country. He had to investigate the actual place with enough care that he could begin to invent his own version. It’s this process of re-imagination that makes the fictional locale so real and gives the novel an impact you could never achieve with a thousand newspaper stories."]
North Korea, the Stalinist “hermit kingdom” and one of the world’s most backward and isolated countries, is also a realm where fiction making — state-sponsored storytelling, that is — reigns supreme. At least, that’s how Adam Johnson depicts the dictatorial Communist state in his harrowing and deeply affecting new novel, “The Orphan Master’s Son,” which recounts the picaresque adventures of its title character, Jun Do, a soldier turned kidnapper turned surveillance officer, who tries to stay alive as he stumbles his way through the government bureaucracy.Set in the recent past, when the country’s eccentric strongman Kim Jong-il (who died in December) still ruled with an iron whim, the novel conjures an Orwellian world in which the government’s myths about the country — its success, its benevolence, its virtues in taking on the evils perpetrated by the United States, South Korea and Japan — are not only tirelessly drilled into the citizenry through propaganda broadcasts but have also become an overarching narrative framing everyone’s lives. As Jun Do learns, people’s identities are subordinate to the roles the state expects them to fulfill, and even words or acts that inadvertently cast doubt on the greatness and goodness of the government can lead to death or prison or torture.
“Where we are from,” says one character, “stories are factual. If a farmer is declared a music virtuoso by the state, everyone had better start calling him maestro. And secretly, he’d be wise to start practicing the piano. For us, the story is more important than the person. If a man and his story are in conflict, it is the man who must change.” (...)
In both “Emporium” (set largely in America) and “The Orphan Master’s Son” there is a heightened apprehension of the precariousness of life, the randomness of fate, the difficulty of emotional connection. Because the hardships of real life in North Korea, described by defectors, can be Kafkaesque in their surreal horror, it’s harder to tell in these pages where Mr. Johnson’s penchant for exaggeration leaves off. (...)
The North Korean prisons here seem designed to erase identity and all that makes one human. “In Prison 33, little by little, you relinquished everything, starting with your tomorrows and all that might be,” Mr. Johnson writes. “Next went your past, and suddenly it was inconceivable that your head had ever touched a pillow, that you’d once used a spoon or a toilet, that your mouth had once known flavors and your eyes had beheld colors beyond gray and brown and the shade of black that blood took on.”
As for Mr. Johnson’s hero, Jun Do, he goes from being an instrument of the state — kidnapping an assortment of people on official orders and eavesdropping on foreign radio transmissions — to becoming one of its victims. Along the way he commits terrible acts that will haunt the rest of his days, and yet he doggedly clings to the goal of survival.
And then, unexpectedly, he meets and falls in love with Sun Moon, the country’s most famous actress, “the only person who could take away the pain he’d suffered.” His love for her will alter the trajectory of his story and give him the chance to commit a selfless act — inspired, weirdly, by the movie “Casablanca” — that might redeem his life.
In recounting Jun Do’s peregrinations, Mr. Johnson does an agile job of combining fablelike elements with vivid emotional details to create a story that has both the boldness of a cartoon and the nuance of a deeply felt portrait. He captures the grotesque horrors that Jun Do is involved in, or witness to, even as he gives us a visceral sense of the world that his characters inhabit. It’s a world in which anyone may be an informer, and suspicion poisons relationships between parents and children, husbands and wives. Here, even love is considered a liability, an emotion that gives the government leverage over would-be defectors: one more thing it can take away.
by Michiko Kakutani, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Korean News Service
