The Orphan Master's Son

Pak Jun Do grows up in a North Korean orphanage his father runs, which technically makes him not an orphan, a distinction nobody else observes. He is trained as a tunnel fighter in the dark, then as a kidnapper abducting Japanese citizens off beaches, then as a radio operator on a fishing boat listening to transmissions from the outside world, and eventually he takes another man's identity entirely.

The second half of the novel is told partly through state loudspeaker broadcasts narrating the official version of events, and partly through an interrogator who considers himself a humane professional, so the same events arrive three times in three registers.

The second half turns on Sun Moon, the country's most famous actress and the wife of the man whose name Jun Do has taken, and on a plan to get her and her children out. It is the closest thing to a love story the setting allows, which is to say not very close.

Johnson is writing about a state where identity is assigned rather than owned, and where the biography of a citizen can be replaced overnight without anyone being permitted to notice it has changed.

It is long, tonally strange, and moves from picaresque comedy to something much worse without warning. The torture sequences are extended and the interrogator's cheerful professional pride is the most disturbing voice in the book.

Johnson visited North Korea once and worked otherwise from defector testimony, and the result is a novelist's construction rather than reportage, which he says clearly. Best for readers who want fiction to go somewhere journalism cannot, and who can tolerate a novel that keeps changing what kind of book it is.