The Orphan Master’s
Son is a wonderfully written novel with a complex and, at times, confusing narrative
structure that may not make it everyone’s cup of tea. Nevertheless, and without needing to resort
to the flip comment that it is, undoubtedly, the best novel set in North Korea
this year, I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys an intelligent novel that
requires the reader to commit to it.
We first meet Jun Do, the principal actor in the book, in
a remote orphanage in North Korea. He
believes that he is the son of the master of the orphanage and a beautiful
woman who has been transferred by the regime to Pyongyang, the capital. The narrative does, however, leave open the
possibility that this is a fantasy created by Jun Do to help him create a sense
of identity and, indeed, the nature of identity in a totalitarian state runs as
an undercurrent throughout the novel, emerging as a major theme in the second
half.
Upon reaching manhood, Jun Do is conscripted into the
North Korean armed forces, the fourth largest in the world believe it or
not. Orphans, or those like Jun Do who
end up being treated as orphans, are given the hardest and most dangerous jobs
in the military and Jun Do becomes a tunnel fighter, trained to fight hand to
hand in the total darkness of the tunnel system dug by the North Koreans under
the Demilitarised Zone.
His toughness and prowess in this most demanding of roles
is Jun Do’s first step in a varied career that leads him from tunnel fighting
to kidnapping Japanese on behalf of the state and from monitoring English language
radio broadcasts on board a trawler to taking part in a bizarre trade mission
to Texas.
This first half of the novel is somewhat picaresque and is
a collection of episodic stories, a kind of Orphan’s Progress. Jun Do is, largely, carried along by events,
conforming to the state’s demands of him and not really questioning
things. His identity is given to him by
the government and his only real complaint is that people insist on identifying
him as an orphan despite his adamant belief that he is not.
At this point, there is a major shift in the structure and
plotting of the novel which is quite confusing at first and, I suspect, could alienate
many readers. The chapters of the second
half of the novel are divided between chapters telling the continuation of Jun
Do’s story and chapters written from the viewpoint of the public address
systems that continually blast out propaganda to the people of Pyongyang and
which tell Jun’s story from an entirely different perspective, highlighting the
warped alternative narrative that the totalitarian system imposes on the lives
of its citizens. The shift in structure
is magnified by the author’s decision to begin the second half midway through
its timeline and to fill in the gaps gradually through the remainder of the
story
.
We are introduced to Commander Ga, a military hero married
to Sun Moon, North Korea’s most important actress. However, it soon becomes apparent that
Commander Ga is, in fact, our old friend Jun Do. And, most bizarrely, no one other than Sun
Moon and her children seems to be aware of this. Although we are slowly told how this peculiar
situation has come to pass, it was quire disconcerting and, once we know that
Jun Do has killed Commander Ga in prison and assumed his identity, it is a
shocking reminder of how a totalitarian regime can alter history and force its
citizens to accept lies and deceit.
From here, although the narrative is complex, the basic
plot becomes a relatively straightforward one
in which Jun Do plots to help Sun Moon and her children escape the
madness and oppression of Pyongyang and defect to the USA. The growing assertion by Jun Do of his own
ability to choose his identity and fate turns the novel into an existentialist
text for me as Jun Do ceases to be a passive acceptor of his life but takes
positive action to determine his ending.
In reading the second half of The
Orphan Master’s Son, Sartre’s Les Mains
Sales came to mind, in which Hugo, the protagonist, having been pretty
supine for much of the play exerts his will and lays claim to his existence by rejecting
the chance to save his life when targeted by assassins in order to show that a
murder he had committed had been carried out for political reasons rather than
personal jealousy. Given the option to
save himself by accepting the latter, he cries “non recupérable!”
(not salvageable) and seals his own fate.
In enabling Sun Moon’s escape, Jun Do also shows himself able to claim
his own will rather than permanently bending to the will of the state.
Although the soft part of me was desperately hoping for a
happy ending for Jun Do afgter all of his hardships, the lack of one did not
prevent The Orphan Master’s Son from
being highly readable and enjoyable. Although
the author had only visited North Korea once, the respected author Barbara
Demick, an expert on North Korea, has praised the book for its portrayal of
North Korean life. It also says a lot
about the barbarity and surrealism of everyday life in the Hermit Kingdom that
it is difficult to tell which of the appalling details are factual or the
author’s artistic licence.
The Orphan Master’s
Son is, by necessity, a dystopian novel, redolent with echoes of 1984.
It is also, as well as a novel of ideas, a spy story and a love
story. It isn’t perfect - oddly enough,
I found the episode set in Texas to be far less believable that the rest of the
novel, despite the fact that the author is American - but I believe it is an
excellent novel and certainly one of my favourite reads of 2012.
Many thanks to the publisher, Random House, for allowing me to read a review copy from Netgalley.