James Church (1)

The Corpse in the Koryo by James Church has been on my to-read pile for a while. I don't read much straight genre fiction anymore but hard-boiled is one of the few exceptions, and I won't lie: I've always been on the lookout for hardboiled stories set in unusual places and I think setting one in North Korea is one of the more unusual out there short of the end of the world (The Last Policeman, another great one).

As a result the novel inevitably kind of leans into spy novel territory. The usual hardboiled systemic corruption comes in this novel as a result of the state's totalitarian nature. This means that much of the tension comes from Inspector O's moral code being less about finding the truth regardless of danger and more about doing the best he can to keep his department (which is just him and his direct supervisor) from being used as a pawn in the factional conflicts going on in the NK government.

The major characters around O, like Chief Pak and the military commanders like Kang and Kim tend to hide a lot from him either to keep him out of trouble or to manipulate him, so it does create a really kind of compelling mystery as the pieces start to click into place but has the problem where O himself lacks a lot of...agency in what's happening to him. It makes sense given the setting, of course, but the first third of the novel is really just O getting shuffled around the countryside while machinations happen behind the curtain and the seeds of later plot are planted, so the pacing and suspense kind of lags a bit. O is an observant character, as detectives in the genre usually are, so his descriptions of the people and places are quite lovely and poetic, meaning that those sections aren't entirely without charm.

Pak leaned forward when he walked, sailing into a wind no one else could feel. For someone who examined ideas seamlessly, his thoughts gliding like a razor cutting silk, he moved with a surprising lack of grace, shoulders hunched, arms swinging fitfully just out of rhythm with his steps. He never looked comfortable with gravity; it was a concession he seemed unwilling to make. As a man, Pak was handsome. The shaggy gray hair made his crisp features seem more delicate and finely wrought. Everything fit perfectly on his small face, even the hint of a frown that rested almost constantly on his lips and the elusive sense of worry that never left his shining eyes.

The ever present threat of the secret police - O describes them as regularly entering his apartment just to move things around and remind him that they're still watching him - creates this alluring prose where characters never fully say what they mean, where everyone speaks in half truths. It creates a surreal, and almost farcical world for O to operate in; a world where Pak and O discuss the case by leaving their office and going to a children's park to talk, sitting on a swingset so they can't be heard by the listening devices planted.

>Pak laughed out loud. “A problem.” He laughed again, a long, rolling laugh, so that pretty soon I joined in. The two of us, sitting by a rusty swing set, laughing. A few people walked by, but no one stopped.We went down the stairs into the street. “Ever notice the way the sunlight dances on the river, Inspector?” The river was several blocks away, hidden behind buildings that were empty and served no purpose except as a source of shade for crowds waiting for a bus in the late afternoon. Pak couldn’t see the river; he was just keeping up a one-sided conversation. “You should try your hand at poetry, Inspector. Maybe join a club studying ancient dance.”“Listen, Richie, where I live, we don’t solve cases. What is a solution in a reality that never resolves itself into anything definable? For you, life is optimistic, endless in possibilities, but you think the parts are limited and self-contained. That’s why you make lists. You think it is possible to check off what is done. Me, I don’t ever make a list. What if someone sees it? It would lack something important, surely, and that would be evidence to be used against me. Not today, maybe, but someday. For the same reason, I don’t draw diagrams. I don’t connect dots. Unnecessary, because I know that nothing is a straight line. Everything is circles, overlapping circles that bleed into each other.”

"Bleeding circles?”

“To solve a case you have to put the wind in a jar. For me, life consists of badly limited possibilities, but I know the parts are endlessly rearranged, always shifting, always changing. Nobody puts down their foot twice in the same place. I once heard a Westerner say, ‘What you see is what you get.’ We laughed for days about that at the office. Nothing is like that. Nobody is like that. But it’s what you people want to believe. Straightforward, direct, what’s the term?”

“Transparent.”… (meer)

I started this series over Christmas (2017), and this was my summer (2018) installment. Church's novels focus on a (now-retired) North Korean police inspector who previously served in the North Korean intelligence service. If you enjoyed Martin Cruz Smith's novels about Soviet-era detective Arkady Renko, you just may enjoy this series. In the Man with the Baltic Stare, Inspector O leaves North Korea for the first time since prior to the first novel. This novel was clearly written with the transition from Kim Jong-il to Kim Jong-un in mind. Wikipedia says that Church's (his name is a pseudonym--the author served in the Western intelligence service) "Inspector O" novels have been well-received by Asia specialists for offering "an unusually nuanced and detailed portrait" of North Korean society. Other critics praise Church for his ability to convey "the suffocating atmosphere of a totalitarian state," and for providing "a vivid window into a mysterious country." He's not Solzhenitsyn (see my review of "In the First Circle," which I also read this summer), but these are definitely a worthwhile read. Book 5 is on my pile of library books to read in the next month or so.… (meer)