On Adam Johnson's "The Orphan Master's Son"

For someone who usually turns a blind eye and a deaf ear over the varying degrees of violence that's happening all over the world, it is most unlikely that I am suddenly possessed with the temptation to pick up Adam Johnson's "The Orphan Master's Son" which is basically about the atrocious life inside DPRK (Democratic People's Republic of Korea, or North Korea). There were no shilly-shallies involved and to save me the possibility of going skint the next few days, I goaded a friend to pay half its price with a deal that I lend him the book after reading it. 

I have read (in the news by accident) that once again, North Korea has been beating the Philippines with headline-worthy news on their nuclear attacks over the brewing dispute between the Sultanate of Sulu and Sabah, Malaysia. I can just imagine the toll it took on it's counterpart, the utopiac South Korea and it's personal bugbear, the U.S. If I read even further, the U.S. is ready for it's ballistic attacks. It's always news like these that gives me the funk and keeps me in bed, reading (instead) fiction for a more bearable version of these harsh realities, a diversion. 

But lo! Adam Johnson's work of fiction read like a firsthand experience in the terror torn North. The book circles around three people, with stories veering on the tragic, you'd want to go and save them yourself. Pak Jun Do, is an orphan and a trained assassin and kidnapper. He fell in love with actress Sun Moon, who is the wife of Commander Ga, the sworn enemy of the (then) Supreme Leader Kim Jong Il. There were chapters told in a first person POV and there were those told in a third person POV that sometimes you can't tell which side of reality is being narrated by who. After series of weird turns, Pak Jun Do finds himself in one of the prison camps under the identity of Commander Ga. He assumes marriage to Sun Moon who despite knowing this man who arrived in her house one night is not the Commander Ga who won her as a prized wife for bringing pride in the country. But she falls in love with him, nonetheless (but rather reluctantly). Despite coercion tactics on the autopilot ( whew! for lobotomy) Pak Jun Do still admits to the identity of Commander Ga. There is not a page that doesn't talk about the various oppressions of the people inside this hellish camp. It is a gritty and compelling work that uncovers the various horrors of this isolated half of the Korean peninsula under its supreme leader Kim Jong Il, from the various brutalities inside the camps, its coercion tactics, the massacres, of how people were starved to death, how they are duped under a perverse ideology of “propaganda” and much about cult of personality. This is a tale of aggression, fear, love and political control in one of the most self-ruling, controlled and restricted places in the world. If you've got the heart and the time to read this, it bears a promise of a brilliant story, I swear.