A harrowing trip through North Korea
Remarkable novel makes nightmarish world of state terror and torture horrifyingly alive
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 fulfil, and even words or acts that inadvertently cast doubt on the greatness and goodness of the government can lead to death, 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 practising 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 doing research, Johnson read first-hand testimony from defectors and travelled to North Korea himself. He then used his sharp sense of the absurd and his adrenalin-laced language — the same gifts on display in Emporium, his 2002 collection of short stories — to transform that research into an operatic if somewhat long-winded tale that is at once satiric and melancholy, blackly comic and sadly elegiac. In both Emporium and The Orphan
Master’s Son there is a heightened apprehension of the precariousness of life, the randomness of fate and 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 Johnson’s penchant for exaggeration leaves off.
Like many works of fiction to emerge from troubled or repressive parts of the world, The Orphan
Master’s Son employs the techniques of magical realism to create a hallucinatory mirror of day-to-day circumstances that in themselves dwarf the imagination. The real-life Kim Jong Il, after all, was often described in terms befitting a comic-book villain: Known as “Dear Leader” in North Korea, this dictator, who wore elevator shoes and oversized sunglasses, allowed untold numbers of people to die of starvation during recurrent famines while pumping huge sums of money into the country’s nuclear programs; he banished citizens deemed disloyal to prison camps and sent assassins after defectors.
Johnson’s novel imagines one particularly barbarous prison camp, where would-be escapers are stoned to death, and it describes lobotomies performed with a 20-centimetre nail as a “preferred method of reforming corrupted citizens” and an “auto- pilot” torture machine used by interrogators for “pain delivery.”
An interrogator who has been assigned the case of a professor accused of “counterrevolutionary teachings” (“using an illegal radio to play South Korean pop songs to his students”), says of his craft: “We ramp up the pain to inconceivable levels, a shifting, muscular river of pain. Pain of this nature creates a rift in the identity — the person who makes it to the far shore will have little resemblance to the professor who now begins the crossing. In a few weeks, he will be a contributing member of a rural farm collective, and perhaps we can even find a widow to comfort him. There’s no way around it: To get a new life, you’ve got to trade in your old one.”
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,” 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 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, Johnson does an agile job of combining fable-like 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 wouldbe defectors: one more thing it can take away. In the course of The Orphan Mas
ter’s Son, Jun Do travels with a delegation to America (which results in some ridiculously funny scenes set at a Texas ranch), is sent to a prison camp and later assumes the identity of Sun Moon’s husband, a national hero named Commander Ga, whom he may or may not have killed. His real evolution, however, is more significant: By the book’s end he has grown from a sort of generic Everyman — a faceless representative of the indignities a citizen in North Korea might be subject to — into a full-fledged individual for whom the reader roots and grieves.
In making his hero, and the nightmare he lives through, come so thoroughly alive, Johnson has written a daring and remarkable novel, a novel that not only opens a frightening window on North Korea, but one that also excavates the very meaning of love and sacrifice.