I was rather skeptical when I heard about this novel. A novel set in the secretive North Korea written by an American? Reading every book published on the country together with some interviews and a brief visit was not going to cut it, I thought. But I soon forgot about that, or at least forgave it, once I started reading. The blurbs inside the cover compared the novel to Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World and Cloud Atlas. (Well, the part in a future dystopic Korea is reminiscent.) It’s one of those novels that I found non-putdownable. I would love to know what a North Korean would make of it--one who’s left and thus free to be honest about that Through-the-Looking-Glass State. Johnson says he’d like to see the day himself when North Koreans can freely write about life in North Korea. This is how the novel describes life there at one point:
Ga thought about reminding the Dear Leader that they lived in a land where people had been trained to accept any reality presented to them. He considered sharing how there was only one penalty, the ultimate one, for questioning reality, how a citizen could fall into great jeopardy for simply noticing that realities had changed.
Maybe then, it’s a deliberate part of the design that parts of this novel are are hard to credit--and sadly I don’t mean the picture of North Korea. The novel is broken into two parts. The first, “The Biography of Jun Do” is fairly plausible. At least I didn’t question the narrative until a certain visit to Texas--perhaps not uncoincidentally, the land of the tall tale. That first section of the novel is third person, told almost entirely from Jun Do’s point of view. The exceptions are these short official announcements interspersed throughout the book--the source of much of the novel’s dark humor. Then in the second part, “The Confessions of Commander Ga,” we cross the line to the truly far-fetched, and we get not just Jun Do’s perspective, but that of one of the state’s interrogators.
Ordinarily when something so strains my suspension of disbelief that far, I’d stop reading, but I kept turning pages--it’s great storytelling. It might have shaved a star off my rating, but it didn’t lose me because the narrative compels belief in its reality--metaphorically even if not literally. Not always easy to read though, parts of this story are unsettling. Particularly trying to decide what we’re supposed to take seriously, what’s parody, what’s lies, what’s truth--even Jun Do’s identity is murky. Other parts are downright macabre, horrifying--old-fashioned fiendish vampires have nothing on this police state. But memorable? Oh yes. This isn’t one I’ll forget easily.
