The Orphan Master's Son

 Holy cow was this a tough one. If it had not been a book for my book group, I am not sure I would have finished it. This novel by Adam Johnson, which won the 2013 Pulitzer for fiction, is an absolutely harrowing journey into the lives of people living in North Korea during the tenure of Kim Jong Il. The perspective is predominantly that of Jun Do (an allusion to John Doe?) who is raised in an orphanage run by his father. His journey through the crazy machinations of politics has him initially kidnapping people from Japan or S. Korea and returning them to N. Korea, being part of a mission to the United States to retrieve something the Dear Leader says was stolen from him, and  finally being put on a fishing boat to monitor radio communications from other countries. When Jun Do becomes part of a cover-up for a fellow crewman's defection, he eventually finds himself in one of the notorious mining prisons, from which people never return. But fate plays an ironic twist when he encounters General Ga, who has come to torture Jun Do but gets killed instead. Jun Do puts on his uniform and assumes Ga's identity. Everybody in authority knows he is not really General Ga, but reality is what the Dear Leader says it is, and right now he has need for the continued existence of General Ga. So Jun Do, walks out of the prison, returns to the home and family of General Ga, and begins making plans for them all to escape. We also have a storyline from one of the official torturers who begins to see the insanity of the system but not in time to save himself or one of his colleagues.

     This is simply a nightmarish or, as The New York Times calls it, "Kafkaesque" existence where any accusation of disloyalty can end your life. It turns parents and children against one another, or colleague against colleague in order to secure one's own safety. Propaganda is ubiquitous and nobody is truly safe, however. As one character notes, “Where we are from, stories are factual. If a farmer is declared a music virtuoso by the state, everyone had better start calling him maestro. And secretly, he’d be wise to start practicing the piano. For us, the story is more important than the person. If a man and his story are in conflict, it is the man who must change.”
Johnson based his story on actual testimony from N. Korean defectors, although he said he had to tone it down in places because the reality would be too shocking. Adam Johnson is also an English professor at Stanford University; there is a biography from Wikipedia here. Additional reviews from The Guardian, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, and The Telegraph.