We know very little about North Korea. Every so often news arrives of summary executions ordered by the Leader of the Greatest Democratic Republic in the World and of nuclear tests carried out or threatened. We know, of course, that there is nothing of the republic or of the democratic about that country, that it is in fact a totalitarian regime, and that the ferocious dictator of the day follows his father Kim Jong-il and his grandfather Kim Il-sung, founder of a wholly familial tyranny begun in 1948. Leafing through the news, one understands that the very few reports coming out of that country are hard to verify, and that a curtain of silence, born of the terror afflicting the North Korean people, is the container within which the destinies of millions of people subjected to violence of every kind are played out. This, and little else. But if we want to venture into that world, we must move away from the news reports and immerse ourselves in the reading of one of the finest novels of recent years. Il Signore degli Orfani by Adam Johnson is one of those books that calls into question the idea we have of literature: what it is or ought to be, and the task we assign it. This is one of those books consistent with Sciascia’s idea that we know nothing of the world and of men until literature reveals it to us.
Seven years of research before sitting down to write, and what Johnson has in mind is not an essay on a totalitarian regime but a novel about life inside a dictatorship. On the surface nothing really new but, given the impenetrability of that regime, the project of unveiling its features is already a starting point worthy of attention. If we add to this a supremely effective plot and elegant writing, we find ourselves before a beautiful, original novel. But not a recent one. Its publication in fact dates to 2012, its Pulitzer Prize to 2013. In Italy it was published that same year by Marsilio, in Fabio Zucchella’s translation.
These few years since publication have taken nothing from its beauty or its topicality (news has recently come of a new test, and of North Korea’s demand to be recognized as a nuclear power).
Il Signore degli Orfani is a novel of passion, courage, anguish and love: a concentrate of emotions, never banal, that takes shape in the continuous flow of the protagonist’s life, in the perfect rhythm of an impassioned narrative. Pak Jun Do grows up in the orphanage run by his father. Of his mother he knows only that she is a very beautiful woman, kidnapped to become a singer for the state. But Pak Jun Do is also a fine product of indoctrination, of habituation, of self-sacrifice to the regime. Like a good son of the fatherland he endures unspeakable abuses to become a perfect soldier, a trusted man. And yet, as one reads on, one senses more and more a weakness, a chink, the not entirely successful annihilation of the young man’s will. The incessant rhythm of events is accompanied by the discovery of a terrifying reality, a human and physical geography that surprises the reader at every page.
To escape the constant exploitation to which he is subjected at the orphanage, Pak Jun Do enlists in the army, opening himself to new and no less harrowing experiences. He learns taekwondo and in a short time becomes the leader of a commando squad. Fighting in the dark and enduring pain are crucial skills for those assigned to the tunnels that stretch from North Korea deep into South Korean territory. Co-opted by Officer So, he will move on to kidnapping Japanese citizens on the coasts of Japan, in an anguishing suspension of the most human feelings. A plausible career in an absurd world that proceeds by leaps, catapulting him into a new posting as radio operator aboard the fishing vessel Junma, tasked with deciphering the messages exchanged by the Japanese, the Americans and the South Koreans in the Sea of Japan. In that role he has the chance to listen in on the conversations of two American women rowing around the world. From that experience begins his troubled relationship with the West, a world entirely unknown except as recounted by the regime. When the fishing boat is boarded by an American warship, Pak Jun Do draws the attention of an officer who senses the different assignment for which he is probably destined, since, unlike a proper fisherman, he has no tattoo on his chest. An altercation between officers and the improper seizure of the flag and of the portrait of the Dear Leader change the destinies of all the men on board, not least Jun Do, who first shields an officer’s defection and later, once accepted by the crew as one of their own, having no wife, decides to have the face of the national actress Sun Moon tattooed on his chest and to submit to the attentions of the regime’s men.
Terrible interrogations follow, then honors and tortures and a grave wound inflicted by a shark. But life keeps holding surprises and unexpected assignments for him, such as joining a delegation bound for the United States, for Texas. There he will meet a senator and his wife who, moved by a suspicion, sets off a misunderstanding about Jun Do’s true role and true identity (she believes he is in fact North Korea’s ferocious Minister of Prisons), giving the story yet another turn. The novel changes register once more when, in the second part, an interrogation agent recounts, in the first person, the events in which Jun Do is the protagonist: the aberrations, the tortures, the fear capable of neutralizing anyone who comes into contact with Division 42 (the special secret-service unit in which the agent serves). What emerges is a narrower world, yet one even more representative of a reality pervaded by collective paranoia, by the sick attunement of an oppressed people with its oppressor, and by the impossibility of breaking free of terror when terror becomes a place in which to survive.
Although Pak Jun Do becomes an impostor – or perhaps precisely for this reason – the Dear Leader accepts him at his side and allows him to carry on the farce of a new identity. At this point the protagonist’s transformation seems to come about: closeness to Sun Moon and to her private life brings the birth of a purpose and the surfacing of a will so tragically denied by the abuses and controls he has endured. Falling in love with the actress and a growing repugnance toward the regime generate a third and more powerful drive: the conquest of freedom. But freedom is, for Jun Do, a project that does not concern himself, as if the true personal victory lay in winning the freedom of others. So it is not being considered a national hero, nor the countless battles won for survival, nor even the endurance of pain, but the aspiration to an unknown condition that is the real engine of change and, at the same time, the beginning of the end.

As events unfold there emerges, in all its aberrant power, the syntax of the regime, the forms of a submission that passes through the stories told by the loudspeakers present in every home. A hypnotic, surreal propaganda that tells of the country’s heroes, of military might and of democracy fulfilled through the participation of the entire population in necessary production and in self-defense against the ever-possible attacks of the surrounding world.
And then the constant American threat, skillfully neutralized by the acumen of the Dear Leader, capable of great decisions and moved, besides divine protection, by love for his people. The dissoluteness and indolence of the Americans is all in those satellite photos showing a world lit up in the middle of the night, while in North Korea the lights go out in the evening (in the streets as in the homes) to favor the well-earned rest of men and women. Those photos, distributed to the people, speak of a world that embodies everything the Great Korean Republic rejects as the origin of all evils.
Many beautiful pages, but a handful of lines is enough for Johnson to make the reader grasp the universe within which the interpretation of that distant reality of depravity takes shape: a dialogue between Sun Moon (the singer Jun Do falls in love with, and to be near whom he will do whatever proves necessary) and an American rower. It is in truth a brief monologue in which individual imagination and the collective vision formed through propaganda overlap in a description that is shattering and literarily perfect:

“I know very well that suffering will come for me too. It is so for everyone. My turn could be just around the corner. I wonder what you must endure every day in America, without a government to protect you, without someone to tell you what to do. Is it true that they give you no ration cards, that you must find food on your own? Is it true that you work for no other purpose than a reward in paper money? What is California, the place you come from? I have never seen it in a photograph. What do the American loudspeakers say when the curfew begins, what are you taught in your communes about raising children? Where does a woman take her children on a Sunday afternoon? And if a woman loses her husband, how does she know whether the government will assign her a good replacement? Whom will she have to please, so that her children get the best leader in the Youth Troops?”

The awareness that one is reading a novel is not enough: that delirious reality takes over, and siding with the protagonist is a little like coming to the defense of one’s own world, so distant, for all its faults, from that reality. The aberrations of totalitarianism become, more and more, the delirium capable of transforming a people, of subjugating it, yes, but also of annihilating it psychologically, of depersonalizing until not even a residue of individual conscience is left. And when something resists, denunciation and punishment go to work: the re-education camps, or revenge upon the family.
The language is gentle even when it portrays horror, light in certain respects, yet endowed with an intrinsic force capable of speaking in images and rendering perfectly the idea of splinters of humanity struggling between abdication to authority and the pursuit of freedom. Nor is irony lacking, or a certain comedy in the protagonist, at first naive and rash, then ever more aware and determined.
In his choice of names Johnson plays with words: the assonance of Jun Do with John Doe, the nickname given in the United States to persons whose identity is unknown or kept secret, and the name of the beloved singer Sun Moon – which sounds Oriental but is the union of two English words – are small pearls revealing an attention that never flags. And then the continual change of pace, the triple register (a first part in the third person, a second told by a mysterious officer in charge of interrogations and, between the two, the incursions of the regime’s voice admonishing, caressing and educating from the loudspeakers): all handled with assurance and style.
The transformation of that reality into a metaphor of the genealogy of power contains within it the distinctive traits of an authoritarianism in which the word and the exercise of tyranny through violence proceed in step. Violence intervenes where the word fails. It is in narration, in the fantastic construction of a world, that totalitarianisms of every kind find their justification, though each in a way of its own.
Il Signore degli Orfani is only in appearance a book of diversion; in its more than five hundred pages are all the elements that make a great novel, the perfect meeting of testimony, reality and imagination. A book in which the story of one man crosses the History of a people, and narrative becomes a warning, in case we had forgotten the drifts opened up by power exercised through communication.

Marcello Marino taught Ethics of Communication at the University for Foreigners of Perugia and General and Social Pedagogy at the University of Perugia and the University of Siena. He has published essays in various journals and monographs with Franco Angeli, Rizzoli and Morlacchi University Press.