An epic novel and a thrilling literary discovery, The Orphan Master’s Son follows a young man’s journey through the icy waters, dark tunnels, and eerie spy chambers of the world’s most mysterious dictatorship, North Korea.
Pak Jun Do is the haunted son of a lost mother—a singer “stolen” to Pyongyang—and an influential father who runs Long Tomorrows, a work camp for orphans. There the boy is given his first taste of power, picking which orphans eat first and which will be lent out for manual labor. Recognized for his loyalty and keen instincts, Jun Do comes to the attention of superiors in the state, rises in the ranks, and starts on a road from which there will be no return.
Considering himself “a humble citizen of the greatest nation in the world,” Jun Do becomes a professional kidnapper who must navigate the shifting rules, arbitrary violence, and baffling demands of his Korean overlords in order to stay alive. Driven to the absolute limit of what any human being could endure, he boldly takes on the treacherous role of rival to Kim Jong Il in an attempt to save the woman he loves, Sun Moon, a legendary actress “so pure, she didn’t know what starving people looked like.”
Part breathless thriller, part story of innocence lost, part story of romantic love, The Orphan Master’s Son is also a riveting portrait of a world heretofore hidden from view: a North Korea rife with hunger, corruption, and casual cruelty but also camaraderie, stolen moments of beauty, and love. A towering literary achievement, The Orphan Master’s Son ushers Adam Johnson into the small group of today’s greatest writers.
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Adam Johnson on The Orphan Master's Son
When I arrived at Pyongyang's Sunan Airport a few years ago, my head was still spinning from a landing on a runway lined with cattle, electric fences and the fuselages of other jets whose landings hadn't gone so well. Even though I'd spent three years writing and researching The Orphan Master's Son, I was unprepared for what I was about to encounter in “the most glorious nation in the world.”
I'd started writing about North Korea because of a fascination with propaganda and the way it prescribes an official narrative to an entire people. In Pyongyang, that narrative begins with the founding of a glorious nation under the fatherly guidance of Kim Il Sung, is followed by years of industry and sacrifice among its citizenry, so that when Kim Jong Il comes to power, all is strength, happiness and prosperity. It didn't matter that the story was a complete fiction--every citizen was forced to become a character whose motivations, desires and fears were dictated by this script. The labor camps were filled with those who hadn't played their parts, who'd spoken of deprivation instead of plenitude and the purest democracy.
When I visited places like Pyongyang, Kaesong City, Panmunjom and Myohyangsan, I understood that a genuine interaction with a North Korean citizen was unlikely, since contact with foreigners was illegal. As I walked the streets, not one person would risk a glance, a smile, even a pause in their daily routine. In the Puhung Metro Station, I wondered what happened to personal desires when they came into conflict with a national story. Was it possible to retain a personal identity in such conditions, and under what circumstances would a person reveal his or her true nature? These mysteries--of subsumed selves, of hidden lives, of rewritten longings--are the fuel of novels, and I felt a powerful desire to help reveal what a dynastic dictatorship had forced these people to conceal.
Of course, I could only speculate on those lives, filling the voids with research and imagination. Back home, I continued to read books and seek out personal accounts. Testimonies of gulag survivors like Kang Chol Hwan proved invaluable. But I found that most scholarship on the DPRK was dedicated to military, political and economic theory. Fewer were the books that focused directly on the people who daily endured such circumstances. Rarer were the narratives that tallied the personal cost of hidden emotions, abandoned relationships, forgotten identities. These stories I felt a personal duty to tell. Traveling to North Korea filled me with a sense that every person there, from the lowliest laborer to military leaders, had to surrender a rich private life in order to enact one pre-written by the Party. To capture this on the page, I created characters across all levels of society, from the orphan soldier to the Party leaders. And since Kim Jong Il had written the script for all of North Korea, my novel didn't make sense without writing his role as well.
Featured Photographs
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| Anti-tank devices seen while traveling south from Pyongyang toward Panmunj | DPRK soldier |
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| Air raid sirens | Revelutionary Martyr's Cemetery on Mount Taesong |
Review
“Johnson’s novel accomplishes the seemingly impossible: an American writer has masterfully rendered the mysterious world of North Korea with the soul and savvy of a native, from its orphanages and its fishing boats to the kitchens of its high-ranking commanders. While oppressive propaganda echoes throughout, the tone never slides into caricature; if anything, the story unfolds with astounding empathy for those living in constant fear of imprisonment—or worse—but who manage to maintain their humanity against all odds. The book traces the journey of Jun Do, who for years lives according to the violent dictates of the state, as a tunnel expert who can fight in the dark, a kidnapper, radio operator, tenuous hero, and foreign dignitary before eventually taking his fate into his own hands. In one of the book’s most poignant moments, a government interrogator, who tortures innocent citizens on a daily basis, remembers his own childhood and the way in which his father explained the inexplicable: ‘...we must act alone on the outside, while on the inside, we would be holding hands.’ In this moment and a thousand others like it, Johnson juxtaposes the vicious atrocities of the regime with the tenderness of beauty, love, and hope.”
—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, (STARRED REVIEW )
“[A] fantastical, careening tale…Informed by extensive research and travel to perhaps the most secretive nation on earth, Johnson has created a remarkable novel that encourages the willing suspension of disbelief.…Johnson winningly employs different voices, with the propagandizing national radio station serving as a mad Greek chorus. Part adventure, part coming-of-age tale, and part romance, The Orphan Master's Son is a triumph on every level.”
—BOOKLIST, (STARRED REVIEW )
“Readers who enjoy a fast-paced political thriller will welcome this wild ride through the amazingly conflicted world that exists within the heavily guarded confines of North Korea. Highly recommended.”
—LIBRARY JOURNAL, (STARRED REVIEW)
“[A] vivid, violent portrait of a nation…[a] macabrely realistic, politically savvy, satirically spot-on saga. Johnson’s metathriller, spiked with gory intrigues and romantic subplots, is a ripping piece of fiction that is also an astute commentary on the nature of freedom, sacrifice, and glory in a world where everyone’s “a survivor who has nothing to live for.”
—ELLE
“Ambitious, violent, audacious—and stunningly good.”
— O MAGAZINE
“Adam Johnson has pulled off literary alchemy, first by setting his novel in North Korea, a country that few of us can imagine, then by producing such compelling characters whose lives unfold at breakneck speed. I was engrossed right to the amazing conclusion. The result is pure gold, a terrific novel.”
—ABRAHAM VERGHESE
“An addictive novel of daring ingenuity; a study of sacrifice and freedom in a citizen-eating dynasty; and a timely reminder that anonymous victims of oppression are also human beings who love. A brave and impressive book.”
—DAVID MITCHELL
“I've never read anything like it. This is truly an amazing reading experience, a tremendous accomplishment. I could spend days talking about how much I love this book. It sounds like overstatement, but no. The Orphan Master's Son is a masterpiece.”
—CHARLES BOCK
“The Kim Jong Il that we meet in Adam Johnson’s second novel, set in North Korea, is no cartoon villain, no Team America marionette. He’s a three-dimensional character—a hairsprayed, jump-suited, hopping-mad monomaniac, sure, but a man in whom we can recognize some of our own jealousies and desires. And although he is offstage more often than not in The Orphan Master's Son, Dear Leader, as he’s usually referred to, is omnipresent in every conversation, every moment of intimacy, every sorrow that takes place somewhere in this fictional DPRK…Johnson is a lunatic story teller … Johnson’s seriocomic method of piling farces upon tragedies upon atrocities doesn’t distance us from the violence so much as make it bearable: His scenes of torture display an unflinching, bone-crunching directness. And yet some of the most affecting scenes are the quieter, scenes of domesticity. Nothing in the book is more poignant than the interrogator’s love for, and fear of, his blind frail parents, whom he suspects of spying on him…Peering into one of the world’s most closed societies, the author has located the similarities between us and them, offering the possibility that we in the United States might be able to relate to the cognitive dissonance North Koreans experience on a daily basis. The idea that we can clearly recognize the people behind that iron curtain—that we can identify with their psychological disconnects—ought to console us, just as it ought to trouble us.”
—BOOKFORUM, DECEMBER/JANUARY 2012 ISSUE
“Blending personal story, political history, and what one character calls ‘the greatest North Korean love story ever told,’ Johnson follows an orphan who starts out as a tunnel soldier and rises through the military ranks until he’s set to challenge Kim Jong-Il himself. Nothing but raves, everywhere I look.”
—LIBRARY JOURNAL Seasonal Fiction Round-Up
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
80 of 84 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Meet Jun Do,
By
This review is from: The Orphan Master's Son: A Novel of North Korea (Hardcover)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
If you were taking one of those free association tests and the tester asked your response to "North Korea," what words and pictures would come to your mind? For most, I suspect it's nameless, faceless workers wearing identical clothing, haircuts and Party badges, living in primitive conditions under the most paranoid, repressive regime imaginable, where the only citizen allowed to be an individual is that short man with the odd jumpsuits and pompadour; i.e., the "Dear Leader," Kim Jong Il.Adam Johnson shows that there's a lot of life and humanity, and even humor, behind those conceptions of rigid uniformity, especially in his protagonist, Pak Jun Do. When Jun Do meets some Americans (through an amazing series of events), they mis-hear his name as John Doe. That's a revealing mistake. In North America, we use "John Doe" to represent a male character whose identity we don't know. Sometimes we use the name to mean an Everyman. Both are appropriate for Jun Do, who was raised in an orphanage as the son of its master. He doesn't know what happened to his mother and his father is unknowable. His name isn't even his; like all residents of the orphanage, he's been assigned the name of one of Korea's political martyrs. Jun Do's life, threading through this book, is one of astonishing hardship, pain and endurance. He is a soldier, an intelligence officer on board a fishing boat, a prisoner in a work camp and a torture facility, member of a diplomatic mission, and a man who manages to find love and freedom in a most unlikely way. Through the story of his life, the story of contemporary life in North Korea is revealed in all its black-is-white totalitarian craziness. Adam Johnson paints such a detailed picture of how the regime operates that we are able to understand how people succumb to its relentless propaganda and repression. Several times, characters profess horror about the fact that Americans must pay for everything and that they lack the protection and safety of having the government tell them what to do in every aspect of their lives. Jun Do says he doesn't think he could ever feel free in the US; that everything in North Korea makes simple, clear sense and it's the most straightforward place on earth. You'll have to read the book to see how his worldview is transformed by watching a forbidden DVD of Casablanca. The book can be confusing, as it jumps from one narrator to another, one time period to another, one style to another, with no explanation. But it's so vividly written, I didn't worry about the shifts and came to enjoy the crazy-quilt style. In an interview of Adam Johnson by author Richard Price, Price describes the book as a collision of many genres: bildungsroman, prison narrative, sea story, romantic drama, escape thriller, comic picaresque, Korean heroic opera. I'd have to add in agitprop to make a complete listing of genres represented. I didn't feel like I needed an explanation of why it's written this way, but it was still interesting to hear Johnson's answer that he sees his book as a "trauma narrative," in which a survivor of traumatic experiences tells stories that are similarly disjointed and that "bend and mix genres as characters attempt to patch their stories back together using the stories they find around them." This is one of the most unusual, riveting, touching and unforgettable books I've read. Recommended.
31 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Eye Opening Information - Heart Wrenching Story,
By
This review is from: The Orphan Master's Son: A Novel of North Korea (Hardcover)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
The Orphan Master's Son introduced me to a style of writing that was initially uncomfortable: trauma narrative. The author teaches creative writing at Stanford, so he crafts the shifts in perspectives and chronology, and uses vehicles of narration such as propaganda loudspeakers to assist in moving the story along while adding depth to the North Korean experience.Much of my understanding of the purpose of the propaganda and seemingly pointless interchanges between characters didn't occur until the last half of the book, as the author slowly brings all the fractured pieces together, much in the way a real life investigation might progress, with a piece of evidence here, a testimony there, etc. In retrospect, I can say that it was a book well worth reading, both for the gritty understanding of a ravaged country under the control of a mad man, and for an appreciation of the art of trauma narrative. I wouldn't read this as a bedtime story to children. I was horrified by the torture, casual violence, miserable living conditions, and the way the demented mind of a leader can pervade and twist all of reality for an entire nation. It's also a lot of pages. As I waded in and got lost, horrified, and a bit traumatized, myself, I almost put it down and walked away. I'm glad I persisted, because the end result was every bit as satisfying as the movie "Casablanca," referred to in this story for analogy purposes. Moreover, I now think back over that movie and shift my perspective to a trauma narration, which adds even greater understanding to the motivations of its characters. This new perspective shift is a gift from the author, seen by some as a "towering literary achievement." And perhaps it is. To find out, hike up your emotional britches and wade in.
24 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Cruelty of Fate and the Nobility of True Love,
By Bonnie Brody "Book Lover and Knitter" (Port St. Lucie, FL) - See all my reviews (VINE VOICE) (TOP 100 REVIEWER)
This review is from: The Orphan Master's Son: A Novel of North Korea (Hardcover)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson is set in modern day North Korea. North Korea epitomizes Orwellian horror. This is a country where you can be condemned for no more reason than that the poster of Kim Jong Il on your wall has a torn corner, where children spy on their parents and starvation is a way of life. In Korea, the story about a person is what is important, not the person. If the story changes, then the person had better change himself to fit. Every day there are public service announcements telling the stories of the heroes and enemies of the state. The protagonist, Jun Do, is named for one of the "heroes of the revolution", a man who committed suicide to prove himself worthy of the revolution. Jun Do's father, the orphan master, never openly acknowledges his son as such and "proves" his love by being more cruel to him than to the orphans in his care. An orphan's lot in North Korea is grim beyond Dickins' tales of early industrial England. Their lives are brutal, short and exploited. Our protagonist becomes a tunnel soldier, trained in zero light taekwando. He is then conscripted into becoming a kidnapper working in Japan to provide selected individuals to serve Pyongyang's desires. He is successful as a kidnapper and is rewarded by being trained to become an English translator, doing radio surveillance on board a fishing vessel where the sailors all have their wives' pictures tattooed on their chests. He is selected to accompany a State visit to the USA. The visit is something of a humiliation for North Korea and Jun Do is sent off to prison where he kills and takes the place of one of the heroes of modern North Korea, Commander Ga, and falls in love with Ga's wife, Son Moon, a famous movie star. This gripping tale is told by alternating propaganda from Kim Jong Il and the Pyongyang regime with the often grim reality of the protagonist, the orphan master's son. The propaganda takes the form of stories about the characters themselves, both as heroes and enemies of the State. There is wild adventure, amazing courage, brutal torture and true love. Adam Johnson has written a masterful tale, a love story, a page-turner with philosophical overtones, and adventure thriller. I recommend this book highly, but it is most definitely not for the faint of heart and most assuredly not for children. Read this and weep for cruel fate and rejoice in the power and nobility of true love.
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