The Orphan Master's Son is a fantasy about a place that shares many of the names and characteristics of the country we call North Korea. Pak Jun Do is the titular Orphan Master's Son, a boy as despised as his father's other charges, who moves through some of the stranger 'human resources' of the regime: tunnel warrior, kidnap squad specialist, radio operator on a spy ship, an emissary to Texas. He moves through beautiful little scenes of light and darkness and open water, sharks and rowers and family, a beautiful study of alienation and loyalty to the regime, that closes, as all this things do, with a trip to the gulag.

The second half of the book focuses on "Commander Gu", taekwondo champion, husband of beloved national movie star Sun Moon, Minister of Prison Mines (read, secret Uranium mining). Gu has betrayed the regime, and is being interrogated by the scientific torturers of Division 42 to discover the extent of his betrayal. Gu and Pak are of course the same person, and the story moves across the impostor's journey to the heights of North Korean society, how he becomes intimate with Sun Moon (the most dangerous emotion in a totalitarian regime), and his final heroic sacrifice.

On a sentence to sentence level, this is a beautiful book. But the only parts that ring true are the little meditations on darkness in tunnels and in the night sky at the beginning of the book. The line that defines this book is something like: "In America, men matters and stories change. In North Korea, stories matter and men stay the same." The result is basically operatic (that most Juche of all art farms), melodrama stretched past the breaking point of absurdity and back around to the other side. Reading this, I couldn't help but think of Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer, which covered many of the same themes of identity and loyalty so much more ably. At the end of the day, for all his research (and a trip to North Korea), Adam Johnson is still a white guy with a MFA. His characters are all outwardly loyal, but inwardly dissidents. Their interiority is basically American, and I think a much more interesting angle would have been is "well, what if not?" Totalitarian regimes are basically a life pressed into the format of an opera, and compared to some other literary looks at totalitarian regimes, Johnson plays this opera pretty straight. This is not Solzhenitsynian human dignity in the face of the absolute, or the comic nihilism of Victor Pelevin's Omon Ra. It's a soap opera in a nice suit. Very good for what it is, but not capital-L Literature.