Try to inhabit the no-man’s-land of North Korea in Adam
Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son
without feeling an eerie gray mood take you over. Use it as an aid to
perspective, when you consider the modern ills in your own home country. For
Mr. Johnson has distilled the pain and degradation inflicted on North Koreans
into his protagonist, an orphan who is not an orphan.
And any consideration of this Pulitzer Prize-winning book
must start and end with the main character – a man who cannot even claim his
own name. Mr. Johnson shows that orphans must take their names from one of the “heroes
of the revolution.” As a young boy our protagonist receives the name of a state
hero who committed suicide rather than let any wartime suspicion fall on him. Even
though he really does have a father, he is treated as an orphan – despised and mistreated,
and given all the worst, most dangerous jobs. He thus captures the whole of
North Korean society.
The events of this novel illuminate the perverse and
paranoid customs, particularly the caprices of the so-called criminal justice
system, of this isolated country. The first two thirds feel episodic, until
fate draws our hero into the life of a celebrity actress, a favorite of the dictator’s,
and the story gains some clarity and momentum. The man comes to love her, and
works assiduously for her safety and security. Doing that comes at tremendous
cost, as the hero knows full well. Anyone wanting to escape North Korea must
leave no family or
The author further complicates things by telling the last part
of his story in a fluid chronology – we bounce back and forth between two
periods, one after the hero is arrested the final time and one before. This
strategy creates a tension in the reader – it makes her anxious to learn the
fates of the main characters, and Mr. Johnson conditions us not to expect the
best.
While this book has much to recommend it, it was a tough
slog for me, because of the subject matter and setting. It’s a deserving
Pulitzer winner, for two features: Mr. Johnson’s daring and unorthodox handling
of his plot, and for his creation of a splendid, memorable hero, in whom he
instills a suffering country’s best characteristics and best hopes.
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