The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson
Well, you might not have heard
that Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son won the 2013 Tournament of Books,
but you are probably aware that it did just win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
And well deserved in my opinion; TOMS is one of the best books I have read this
year.
The story takes place in North
Korea, a country shrouded in mystery; what is real and what is imagined, who
can say? All I know is I couldn’t stop
reading. The story follows the life of Pak Jun Do, an orphan who through a
series of fantastical circumstances experiences the absurdity and the despair
of life under a totalitarian regime. “The idea
seemed impossible, preposterous, to him. What person could shift allegiance
toward their oppressor? Who could possibly sympathize with the villain who
stole your life?” Imagine an entire country of over 20 million suffering
from Stockholm Syndrome and you’ll have an idea of life in the DPRK as depicted
in the book. Remarkably, however, despite the brutality and tension inherent in
the subject matter, the story was neither disheartening nor hopeless.
Only time will tell, of course,
but I think this is a work of dystopian fiction that compares favorably to
classics such as Orwell’s 1984 or Huxley’s Brave New World.
