Totalitarian novel, North Korean style

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SEVERAL great novels have been written about totalitarianism.

George Orwell, Ayn Rand and Alexander Solzhenitsyn have penned fictional accounts of tyrannical societies, mostly based on the Soviet example.

But totalitarianism did not disappear with the collapse of the Soviet Union and its empire.

North Korea, whose so-called "Dear Leader," Kim Jong Il, died recently, remains probably the most fully realized totalitarian state on the planet.

This brutal, lawless regime is depicted by American Adam Johnson in a novel that can be placed among the great literary explorations of the totalitarian phenomenon.

Johnson teaches creative writing at Stanford University and lives in San Francisco. This is his second novel.

The main character, the "orphan master's son" of the title, is Jun Do, who grew up in North Korea in an orphanage run by his father.

At the age of 14, Jun Do is conscripted into the North Korean army, where he is trained to fight in tunnels under conditions of total darkness, a skill that would prove invaluable to him later in life.

Jun Do is taught English and given the job of monitoring radio transmissions at sea.

He accompanies a North Korean diplomatic delegation to Texas. But upon his return, he is sent to work in a prison mine.

In the darkness of the mine, he kills a government minister, Commander Ga, and assumes his identity. Ga was a national hero, married to North Korea's "national actress," Sun Moon.

Jun Do moves into Commander Ga's house; initially, Sun Moon is reserved toward him, but eventually they fall in love. This is not as improbable as it sounds; apparently in North Korea "replacements" are found for those who lose their spouses.

Jun Do engineers a dramatic escape from North Korea for Sun Moon and her children, but he is left behind to face the wrath of Kim Jong Il, for whom Sun Moon was a particular favourite.

The actual Kim Jong Il is a character in the novel, and Johnson portrays him in all his sinister wackiness. In his research for the novel, Johnson reportedly visited Pyongyang.

Interspersed throughout the narrative are North Korean propaganda broadcasts. These broadcasts reach into every home and workplace, and are integral to Kim Jong Il's cult of personality.

One broadcast reported that, while golfing with the foreign minister of Burundi, Kim Jong Il shot 11 holes in one.

The novel is well-written; however, shifts in narrative voice and chronology, particularly toward the end, can be confusing.

In a review of the 1921 Russian dystopian novel, We, Orwell praised author E.I. Zamyatin's "intuitive grasp of the irrational side of totalitarianism."

Johnson evinces a similar grasp; he has evoked the pervasive atmosphere of suspicion and paranoia in North Korean society, where a sociopathic ruling elite governs a cowed population by maintaining a constant state of fear.

Graeme Voyer is a Winnipeg writer.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition February 4, 2012 J8