oppression – Great books blog

Pager turner: 7/10
Heart tugger: 7/10
Thought-provoker: 9/10
Overall: 4 stars

The Orphan Master’s Son is about North Korea. And it is brilliant.

What is so powerful about it is that it brings to mind other dystopian novels like Brave New World and 1984, only The Orphan Master’s Son is (essentially) real. Or based in a real place, where unspeakable things happen. Perhaps I should caveat that to say that of course unspeakable things happen everywhere in the world, but the particular ones that Adam Johnson narrates in TOMS were beyond anything that my little Western mind had ever even considered within the bounds of modern reality. Shows what I know.

The book is in two parts – the first tells the story of the protagonist Pak Jun Do’s young-young adult life and the second is the story of Commander Ga. It is difficult to explain how the two relate without giving the essential narrative ploy of the book away (have you seen ‘The Sixth Sense’?) but Johnson’s story-telling technique in breaking up the book this way is elegant, simple and very effective.

Pak Jun Do grew up in an orphanage, and being an orphan is apparently the worst thing to be in North Korea. Though never overtly explained, the implication is that if you have no parents to protect you, you are at the whim of the State to make use of you as it sees fit. So the first half of the book is really a series of horrible, entertaining, mind-boggling misadventures. Tunnelling, pain training, starvation, kidnapping, sailing, shark attacks and (of course) American Sneak Attacks! are all present. It starts a bit slowly but, given all that action, it is safe to say that it builds and becomes engrossing.

The best way to summarise the second half of the book is to say that Commader Ga’s world is a world-turned-upside-down. Imagine putting your whole reality under a microscope and questioning every-single-tiny assumption. It’s like that. It’s scary (but not hide in the corner scary – it’s blow-your-mind scary).

Throughout the book Johnson tells the story of the Orphan Master’s Son through a few different voices, including that of the omnipresent loudspeakers blasting ‘news’ to North Korean citizens. The technique works to force you to consider the different perspectives in the book, but there are a few chapters/characters that I think have more limited success simply when juxtaposed with the Greatness of the others. Similarly, I couldn’t wait to find out what happens and to explore the other-worldliness of North Korea, but the book is 575 pages long. I noticed.

For such an undertaking, I can totally see why Johnson won the 2013 Pulitzer for The Orphan Master’s Son. It’s astonishing – both in the setting/story and the way he manages to tell it. I heartily recommend.

Page turner: 5/10
Heart tugger: 6/10
Thought provoker: 6/10
Overall: 3 stars

The trouble with the True History of the Kelly Gang was that I got bored. I didn’t mean to get bored, but I did. I still Liked it, but I just felt like I sort-of-got-the-point-and-you-know-how-it-ends-anyway so, why bother? Perhaps I would have been more gripped if I knew the core elements of his real life in advance (I didn’t) and thus wasn’t spending so much energy trying to keep track of the characters comings-and-goings. There are a lot of them. But even then, I’m not sure.

As I have since discovered in my historical research – Ned Kelly and the Kelly Gang were Australian outlaws primarily active in the 1870s outback. The book is about Ned, his childhood, and (surprisingly briefly) his gang and its exploits as an adult. The book actually really picks back up in the ending chapter where accounts of his gang’s daring dos really get told.

Ned Kelly in 1880

It’s a clever idea, and the structure of the book is quite nice. As a reader, chapters are bunched into manuscripts, that are clearly Ned’s own scribblings of his life on whatever paper he has to hand. In the end, it becomes clear how these documents have been gathered, grouped, and published for the sake of posterity. Neat. I liked it.

Peter Carey does a wonderful job of making Ned a consistent, likeable, pleasant Outback murderer/Robin Hood type character. I liked Ned.

And yet, somehow, after whizzing through the first half of the book or so, I really did get bored. I felt I ‘got’ Ned – what made him tick – and somehow that early revelation made me much less interested in following him and what happened next. The ‘traps’ (police) are all corrupt. You want your own land. You are oppressed. Pride and honor are of the utmost importance to you. As are horses. Check check check check check. Now get on to your exciting burglaries, get-aways, tell us about your suits of armour! Explain to me more about your ending! Tell me what I always wanted to know!

There is very much a good story in the ‘untold truths’ of the Kelly Gang as clearly the man, myth, legend has a great deal going for it. And I did like this attempt. I suppose the trouble is that I keep having to remind myself of that. It was something a bit different, and certainly worthwhile.

Maybe some Aussies can open my eyes, more, to questions that WERE answered in this book that had I been less ignorant of the principle stories of the Kelly Gang before I started I would have found more exciting and compelling?