A Review: The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson

12:45 pm - January 10, 2012: 4 notes

A Review: The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson

Pak Jun Do, aka The Orphan Master’s Son, is told that the greatest American film, the one he must see, is Casablanca. “‘They say it’s about love,’” his friend and cohort, Comrade Buc, explains.

But no one Jun Do encounters has ever watched the film. Not Buc, who recommends and procures it, not the famous North Korean actress, Sun Moon, who worries that viewing films will taint her acting. Despite knowing of Casablanca’s fame, the North Koreans in Johnson’s novel shun it for one reason. Comrade Buc shrugs, says, “‘I don’t watch black-and-white films.’” When Sun Moon does view the film, she immediately shakes her head “at the primitive nature of black-and-white photography.”

After watching the full movie, though, Sun Moon realizes that black-and-white cinematography is not primitive but layered. Alternately stark and subtle, the lack of color both hides and reveals—Johnson’s keen metaphor for how North Korea functions. In the country he has written, story is everything, and the government continuously rewrites that story, hides information, emphasizes minor details, lies. “Black and white,” a common metaphor for an obvious truth, becomes much more complicated when one man controls what is true.

(STR/AFP/Getty Images)

Jun Do’s own story will fascinate and appall readers in its brutality—and, lucky for Johnson, its timeliness, after Kim Jong-il’s death left the world hungry for North Korean news, fact or fiction.

Jun Do represents a North Korean anomaly: a man who continually does things that no other man has ever done. As the orphan master’s son, he is the only “orphan” at the Long Tomorrows orphanage with parents (a mother once whisked away to Pyongyang haunts the story), but he receives no special treatment or acknowledgement from his father. Throughout the novel, Johnson’s narration impressed me: he has written a book as though he did not write it. With a distant voice that shifts between speakers and with events that topple over each other, Johnson nearly convinces the reader that he does not control this story any more than any man controls his own story in North Korea. As Jun Do ages, men arrive, sporadically, and take him away to new jobs. Kidnapper, radio transmitter, diplomat to America. The why and how are irrelevant—we receive the what and speculate, along with Jun Do, about the rest.

As the plot of Jun Do’s life becomes more twisted and opaque, so does the author’s story. Readers will find a two-part novel: “The Biography of Jun Do” and “The Confessions of Commander Ga.” Commander Ga, minister of prison mines, winner of the Golden Belt in taekwondo, eliminator of homosexuals from the army, husband to the actress Sun Moon. In the latter section, we learn—slowly as Johnson unravels a complicated story—that Jun Do has, again, done what no man before him could or would dare to do: he had rewritten his own story. The only Commander Ga readers will encounter is false, as Jun Do now occupies his life.

In “The Confessions of Commander Ga,” the narrative leaps, nervously, between speakers and times, demonstrating just how tricky storytelling can be and just how subjective truth is. In one story line, the propaganda loudspeakers narrate the year’s “Best North Korean Story,” that of the beloved Sun Moon and the false Commander Ga. In another, we witness Jun Do usurping the Commander’s life. In the last, the false Commander has been captured and one of the interrogators tries to decipher his story. It’s complicated; black and white overlap into indistinct grays. While the propaganda speaker’s narrative seems glaringly false, as readers, we, too, are fed a story.

Only once does the façade of Jun Do’s impersonation rupture, and black and white become stark and obvious. The Dear Leader—who plays an alternately terrifying and humorous role in the book’s latter section—asks Jun Do/Commander Ga how he escaped the prison mine, the act that initiated his impersonation.

Ga thought about reminding the Dear Leader that they live in a land where people have been trained to accept any reality presented to them. He considered sharing how there was only one penalty, the ultimate one, for questioning reality, how a citizen could fall into jeopardy for simply noticing that realities had changed. Even a warden wouldn’t risk that.

Simply: he rewrote reality, became a creator instead of an actor, and the latter section of The Orphan Master’s Son reveals the consequences.

The author has compared his novel to Casablanca; he wants to believe that it holds a love story as tragic and true as Bergman and Bogart’s. After watching the classic film, Sun Moon accuses Jun Do/Commander Ga of being too swayed by its story: “I think you saw that movie and got it in your head that a noble man stays behind.” The love story between these two does mimic Casablanca’s tragedy, does have its place in Johnson’s swirling epic. But the story’s crux is not love—it is storytelling. In North Korea, Johnson’s story insists, anything can happen to anyone at any time. The literal facts, the what and who, matter little. They are malleable. The how of the telling creates the fact.

Here, a bit from the propaganda loudspeakers’ “Best North Korean Story”:

In the headlights they saw a man running from the zoo with an ostrich egg in his hands. Chasing him up the hill with flashlights were two watchmen.

“Do you feel for the man hungry enough to steal?” Commander Ga asked as they drove by. “Or for the men who must hunt him down?”

“Isn’t it the bird who suffers?” Sun Moon asked.

For North Korean listeners, this smart bit of dialogue penned by the propaganda writers would demonstrate Sun Moon’s sensitivity and cleverness. But, as Johnson’s words, the exchange reminds readers that no story is black-and-white and certainly not Jun Do’s, whose life, at any time, reflects each of these iterations. Depending on the perspective and the storyteller, Jun Do is: the man hungry enough to steal, the man who hunts and destroys, the bird who suffers, and readers will starve, hunt, and suffer with him for every page of this brilliant novel.