In local news, our Dear Leader Kim Jong-il was seen offering on-the-spot guidance to the engineers deepening the Taedong River channel. While the Dear Leader lectured to the dredge operators, many doves were seen to spontaneously flock above him, hovering to provide our Reverend General some much needed shade on a hot day.I've recently become interested in trying to determine what makes a Pulitzer Prize winning work of fiction, and with The Orphan Master's Son (which won for 2013), I remain confused. Officially, "the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction recognizes distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life", but with this novel set in North Korea, "American life" is primarily dealt with by contrast, and I suppose to the jury, that's close enough.
The title character is Jun Do (and it's made clear that that is meant to be a play on "John Doe"). He's an orphan who believes (without evidence) that he's the son of the director of the orphanage and a beautiful opera singer, and by virtue of telling himself this story, Jun Do avoids resigning himself to the sad fate of most orphans: being worked to death in dangerous conditions. Repeatedly, it's made clear that in North Korea, reality is a story people tell themselves:
• Jun Do heard the story as if it were being broadcast from some far-off, unknown place. Real stories like this, human ones, could get you sent to prison, and it didn't matter what they were about. It didn't matter if the story was about an old woman or a squid attack -- if it diverted emotion from the Dear Leader, it was dangerous.When an incident happens at sea, the crew must agree on a cover story (one that will survive a brutal interrogation) before returning to port; a fable that brings comfort to starving orphans can be twisted into a satirical song by the residents of Pyongyang; if the Dear Leader declares a stranger to be your husband, that story becomes fact. Jun Do grows and learns to negotiate this dangerous and shifting environment, and even though he has several opportunities to escape North Korea -- and even though he doesn't have a family to leave behind that could be sent to a labour camp (the threat that keeps the residents in line) -- Jun Do can't abandon the reality that he has created for himself. The first half of The Orphan Master's Son is this straight forward narrative, but then the second becomes something else as a nameless interrogator tries to discover the true identity of an imposter and collect his biography before his execution:
• Jun Do told his story, and when the reporter asked his name, Jun Do said it didn't matter, as he was only a humble citizen of the greatest nation of the world.
• And suddenly the story was true, it had been beaten into him.
• You've got to understand -- where's he's from, if they say you're an orphan, then you're an orphan. If they tell you to go down a hole, well, you're suddenly a guy who goes down holes…If they tell him to go to Texas to tell a story, suddenly he's nobody but that.
• The tiger part is only a story. That's what we're really serving them, a story.
• Where we are from, stories are factual. If a farmer is declared a music virtuoso by the state, everyone had better start calling him maestro. And secretly, he'd be wise to start practicing the piano. For us, the story is more important than the person. If a man and his story are in conflict, it is the man who must change.
Our team discovers an entire life, with all its subtleties and motivations, and then crafts it into a single, original volume that contains the person himself. When you have a subject's biography, there is nothing between the citizen and the state. That's harmony, that's the idea our nation is founded upon. Sure, some of our subjects' stories are sweeping and take months to record, but if there's one commodity we have no shortage of in North Korea, it's forever.The point of view shifts between this interrogator, the subject's life leading up to his arrest, and the news feed from a propaganda loud speaker (which transmits into every home and workplace and is mandatory listening) that includes the serialized Best North Korean Story; an omniscient overview of the subject's actions. These three threads foreshadow and double back on each other, but reinforce the notion that reality is simply what is officially recorded. Throughout its entirety, The Orphan Master's Son gives glimpses into the various classes of North Korean society, never shying from the state-sanctioned brutality, and laying bare the bizarroland existence for the citizens of The Most Democratic Nation on Earth.
This felt like a really long book and so much happens that it's hard to consider The Orphan Master's Son as a whole. All I really knew of North Korea before came from Escape from Camp 14: One Man's Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West and that's a very different book: more brutal; more personal; more authentic; a place where people are so demoralized that they don't care what happens to family members -- it's every man for himself (and I do understand that this is the perspective of someone born in a prison camp, but it's a totally different world from what I encountered here). The strange juxtapositions, outlandish adventures, and the demented presence of Kim Jong-il in The Orphan Master's Son read like a Chuck Palahniuk book (if Chuck wanted to grow up and omit the gross-out stuff); this is Palahniuk-style transgressive fiction if that term can be stretched to mean a character in a totally repressive regime wants to break the rules by creating intimacy and rewriting personal stories. It's also Palahniukish in the sense that author Adam Johnson uses the excesses of a weird system to shine a harsh light on America itself -- you know there's a problem if Kim Jong-il praises the American penal system as "the envy of the world". I didn't love The Orphan Master's Son, and despite the many brutal scenes (if you ever get a choice between Commander Park with a box cutter and a shark…), it was often kind of boring. But my biggest complaint would be that it felt overwritten: as people kept circling back to the stories they tell themselves, I never forgot that I was reading a story; that Johnson was creating a reality of his own. And I continue to be confounded by what the Pulitzer Prize judges are looking for.
Edit from 01/18/15:
I'm so disappointed to learn today that Shin Dong-hyuk "massaged the facts" in his memoir, Escape from Camp 14: One Man's Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West. Whatever his motivation was (and I have no doubt that he was horribly mistreated during his life in North Korea), it's dispiriting to think that Kim Jong-un and his gang of brutes might now have any basis to deny charges made by human rights groups.
And especially after this fiasco:
