NY Times Book Review - Orphan Master's Son

[johnkarls]

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NY Times Book Review – 1/13/2012

Kim Jong-il’s Romantic Rival
By CHRISTOPHER R. BEHA – Editor of Harper’s Magazine

The title of Adam Johnson’s second novel is a bit misleading. Raised in the Long Tomorrows orphanage in Chongjin, North Korea, his protagonist believes himself to be the son of the Orphan Master rather than some kid dropped off by his desperate parents. But the primary evidence for this belief — “the unrelenting way the Orphan Master singled him out for punishment” — invites other interpretations. Like the rest of the boys, he is given a name from the list of the 114 Grand Martyrs of the Revolution that will mark him as an orphan for the rest of his life. Pak Jun Do (the given name Jun Do is a homonym of “John Doe”) is appropriate for a character with such a shifting identity, someone who will become both the perpetrator and the victim of countless crimes.

Conscripted into the army after a famine devastates the orphanage, Jun Do patrols the dark tunnels beneath the demilitarized zone before being reassigned to a unit that kidnaps Japanese citizens in night raids. For reasons that are never entirely explained, he is taught English, which leads to a job translating foreign radio transmissions and then to a diplomatic mission to Texas, where he makes friends with a senator’s wife. When that trip ends in disaster, he is sent to a labor camp, where he comes face to face with the diabolical Commander Ga, a national hero and Kim Jong-il’s rival for the affections of an actress called Sun Moon. Jun Do’s training in hand-to-hand tunnel combat helps him defeat Ga, whereupon he takes his place in Pyongyang as Sun Moon’s husband and the father of her children.

If all this sounds convoluted, I should note that I’ve described only the first half of “The Orphan Master’s Son,” which more or less serves as a prologue to the book’s real story: Jun Do’s efforts to get Sun Moon and the children out of the country. Yet Johnson’s novel, far from being too labyrinthine, is an ingeniously plotted adventure that feels much shorter than its roughly 450 pages and offers the reader a tremendous amount of fun.

This isn’t entirely a compliment. Should “fun” really be the first word to describe a novel about one of the worst places on earth? Questions of the moral responsibility attendant on certain artistic subjects can be vexing and frankly tiresome, resurrected with the appearance of every summer blockbuster about the Holocaust or some other historical horror. They would seem to be only more vexing in the case of North Korea, where the horror is still going on and so little is revealed to the outside world, even as the country passes from the “Dear Leader” to his untested son. But this matter of responsibility is largely beside the point in the case of Johnson’s novel, since he clearly intends to do his material justice. The better question is why such a talented writer has failed to make good on that intention.

In his story collection, “Emporium,” and a previous novel, “Parasites Like Us,” Johnson specialized in the sort of darkly absurdist satire familiar to readers of George Saunders and Donald Antrim. “Teen Sniper,” a typical story from “Emporium,” depicts a young sharpshooter who works for the city of Oakland, Calif., assassinating dissatisfied tech company employees. In “Parasites Like Us,” an anthropologist in South Dakota disturbs an ancient burial ground, bringing about the near extinction of human life while offering disquisitions on the rapaciousness of contemporary culture.

Johnson has said that his latest book began in a similarly farcical spirit, as a short story called “The Best North Korean Short Story of 2005,” inspired by the “loonier” elements of Kim Jong-il’s regime. But after some research, which included a trip to Pyongyang, Johnson realized that the “gravity” of his subject matter instilled “a sense of duty.” Having learned this, I found it dispiriting to arrive at a brutal interrogation scene in “The Orphan Master’s Son” and recognize the similarities here to the methods used by the police in the dystopian Oakland of “Teen Sniper.” More dispiriting still was seeing Kim Jong-il appear not just as a loony but as a kind of merry prankster. Even the initial conceit of the Best North Korean Short Story survives in the form of interstitial chapters in which the “official” version of Commander Ga and Sun Moon’s story is projected to all citizens by way of loudspeakers. Taken on their own, these interludes are fine exercises in dark wit, but in the context of a novel that seeks to portray a country’s suffering, they’re unconvincing. Though they occupy only a few pages, they mar the book’s overall effect.

Ultimately, the one rule of art is that you’re permitted anything you can get away with. I raise the question of responsibility with respect to “The Orphan Master’s Son” because the book itself seems to raise it, and because Johnson’s prodigious talent and inventiveness aren’t enough to silence it. Johnson’s very sense of duty may have been what led him astray. In his days of tunnel patrol, Jun Do observes that the key to such work is to “never use your imagination. The darkness inside your head is something your imagination fills with stories that have nothing to do with the real darkness around you.” Johnson might have deployed more imagination, or less. In any event, he has written an exceedingly readable book that never quite shows us the real darkness — or the darkness inside his head.