I have now finished reading all four of “James Church”’s Inspector O novels. (“O,” by the way, is not an initial. It’s the man’s family name.) I can’t claim to understand them fully, but I unquestionably enjoyed them. They are tragic stories, but they didn’t depress me.
Quite remarkable books, all in all. I won’t forget them.
I’ve reviewed the first book, A Corpse in the Koryo, already.
The second book, Hidden Moon, involves a bank robbery—the first, we are informed, in North Korean history.
The third book, Bamboo and Blood, surprises us by jumping back in time. It’s set in the winter of 1997, during the great North Korean famine. It involves an Israeli spy and the murder of diplomat’s wife, and takes O to Switzerland and New York City, where (oddly) he shows no particular interest in food, though he thought about it a lot in A Corpse in the Koryo.
The final book, The Man with the Baltic Stare (I assume it’s the last, though I don’t actually know—it just has the feel of tying off loose ends), is the most audacious of the lot. It’s set in the future, around 2014, and involves the (supposed) murder of a prostitute by a young Korean diplomat in Prague. O, who has, we are informed, been banished (rather to his relief) to the countryside, to live on a mountain top and make wooden toys, is commanded to travel to Prague (there are references to Kafka) to investigate.
There may be readers who can untangle the snakes-in-mirrors plots, but I’ll confess that they’re mostly beyond me. I stayed with the books for the fascinating character of O, and for the marvelous, spare, evocative prose. A constant of the books is that everyone is lying, almost all the time. Actual information is generally conveyed through metaphor, or omission. Even O, though not a liar, is frequently wrong. (A particularly interesting example is his estimation of a particular continuing character, of whom O has not a good word to say throughout the saga, but who turns out, in the end, to be not what O thought.)
O is a good man looking for actual truth, in a system where truth is whatever the government decides today. He is constantly told to investigate things, and then stymied and hindered by the very people who gave him his orders. Frequently his superiors want him to fail. Truth is expendable, as are people. Important characters are murdered suddenly, without foreshadowing, and the shock of it is just part of life in Pyongyang.
O is an enigma (I’m tempted to say a riddle wrapped in an enigma, but that’s a reference to Russia. Russia would appear to be a model of sanity compared to North Korea). He doesn’t seem to be a Communist. He refuses to make the liturgical acts of devotion to the Dear Leader, such as wearing the badge with his portrait. Most telling (it seems to me) is his constant musing on wood, a passion he inherited from his woodworker grandfather. Wood, he insists, must not just be cut up into boards and made into what people want. Each piece of wood has its own nature, bears in its grain the shape of the thing it was born to be. You must learn to know the wood in order to understand what to build with it. This is a profoundly non-collectivist thought, when transposed to human beings.
Nevertheless he’s fiercely loyal to his country, and to his government. His nationalism does not embrace South Korea. For him, South Korea is the enemy, and reunion would be a disaster. Although he doesn’t explicitly say it, the reader gets the impression he’d prefer famine to opening the border.
But are we to consider him wise in this? I don’t know. O is often wrong. I don’t think we’re meant to learn specific lessons from O and his adventures. We’re meant to experience the North Korean mind—if only to understand how impossible it is for us to understand. O’s humanity is at once familiar and alien. The greatest mystery is North Korea itself, and that mystery remains unsolved.