![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
#5 Platform: A Corpse in the Koryo
May. 12th, 2012 12:16 pmIt takes rather a while to find it, for a mystery, but then, the book's not really a mystery, exactly.
Book #20: A Corpse in the Koryo
Author: James Church
Provenance: Borrowed from Westmount Library
I find it hard not to be fascinated on some level with North Korea. It's not something I indulge often, because there's such a high pathos level about the place, but it does draw the attention. How must it be to live in a country so rigidly controlled, and to be so close to other places that were so similar culturally, and yet so much better and more sane places to live? It boggles the mind.
I'd heard of this book rather a while ago; in fact, I have this feeling I bought it for my friend Greg as a present at some point. I finally got around to giving it a try, after the new Kim took over and was settling into the news, and I remembered it. Turns out that it's quite a good story, a mystery that's really a sharp look at the society in which it's set.
Inspector O, a member of the Pyongyang police force, is sent off his beat to take pictures one morning of a car speeding along a road heading up from the south towards the capital. When his camera doesn't work, he gets called into a meeting with two government operatives from different agencies, Kang and Kim, and is then caught in a slowly revealed struggle between them that carries O around the country, dealing with everyone from other police forces to lawless border town residents to resident aliens.
The story isn't a total success - the framing story, where O is telling his story to an Irish agent after all the events of the story, seems particularly unnecessary, and things are opaque for rather longer than was probably called for, pacing-wise - but on the other hand, the characters and their environment are well-sculpted. Church was a former intelligence officer in the area, and his experience certainly shows through in his observations of the society, and all the myriad ways people work around the state's crushing powers. O himself is probably the best example of this, in that he's probably the most overtly against the power structures in the story; he doesn't wear his Dear Leader pin, he keeps around contraband in his office drawers, he hews to a desire to deal with the woodworking his grandfather loved during and after his army surface.
But it may just be that we see the most of O's breaks from authority; certainly, we get the sense that pretty much everyone is trying to work around the rules in one way or another, from importing Western porn to cars to cigarettes, to being able to criticize the state, but only in situations where the massive security apparatus can't see it, ideally. And they see a lot; we see a lot of them, indeed, including around the titular corpse. However, O and the others don't really seem to want to leave. They're proud of their country and what it does. They just want it easier on themselves.
On the whole, this book definitely feeds the fascination with the little hermit country and its people, but it's still a somewhat uneven first effort plot-wise. Perhaps Church will do better in his next book in the series, but this one is still of interest to people who want to understand North Korea more.
Next up: The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks.
Book #20: A Corpse in the Koryo
Author: James Church
Provenance: Borrowed from Westmount Library
I find it hard not to be fascinated on some level with North Korea. It's not something I indulge often, because there's such a high pathos level about the place, but it does draw the attention. How must it be to live in a country so rigidly controlled, and to be so close to other places that were so similar culturally, and yet so much better and more sane places to live? It boggles the mind.
I'd heard of this book rather a while ago; in fact, I have this feeling I bought it for my friend Greg as a present at some point. I finally got around to giving it a try, after the new Kim took over and was settling into the news, and I remembered it. Turns out that it's quite a good story, a mystery that's really a sharp look at the society in which it's set.
Inspector O, a member of the Pyongyang police force, is sent off his beat to take pictures one morning of a car speeding along a road heading up from the south towards the capital. When his camera doesn't work, he gets called into a meeting with two government operatives from different agencies, Kang and Kim, and is then caught in a slowly revealed struggle between them that carries O around the country, dealing with everyone from other police forces to lawless border town residents to resident aliens.
The story isn't a total success - the framing story, where O is telling his story to an Irish agent after all the events of the story, seems particularly unnecessary, and things are opaque for rather longer than was probably called for, pacing-wise - but on the other hand, the characters and their environment are well-sculpted. Church was a former intelligence officer in the area, and his experience certainly shows through in his observations of the society, and all the myriad ways people work around the state's crushing powers. O himself is probably the best example of this, in that he's probably the most overtly against the power structures in the story; he doesn't wear his Dear Leader pin, he keeps around contraband in his office drawers, he hews to a desire to deal with the woodworking his grandfather loved during and after his army surface.
But it may just be that we see the most of O's breaks from authority; certainly, we get the sense that pretty much everyone is trying to work around the rules in one way or another, from importing Western porn to cars to cigarettes, to being able to criticize the state, but only in situations where the massive security apparatus can't see it, ideally. And they see a lot; we see a lot of them, indeed, including around the titular corpse. However, O and the others don't really seem to want to leave. They're proud of their country and what it does. They just want it easier on themselves.
On the whole, this book definitely feeds the fascination with the little hermit country and its people, but it's still a somewhat uneven first effort plot-wise. Perhaps Church will do better in his next book in the series, but this one is still of interest to people who want to understand North Korea more.
Next up: The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks.
