Weekend Reads with Specsavers
1. The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson (Doubleday)
The novel is written by an American Adam Johnson and it is a book that is funny, horrific and moving. It is also one of the novels that I bet is likely to be rated one of the best of the year.
The book is in two parts. The first is The Biography of Jun Do, the orphan master’s song.
Pak Jun Do (or John Doe?) is a soldier in the North Korean army. He digs tunnels, he is employed to kidnap people from the coastal areas of Japan and he works as a spy before falling foul of the state and ending up in a barbarous prison camp.
Then he assumes the identity of one of North Korea’s most famous heroes, and this is second part of the book, The Confessions of Commander Ba. This is when Jun Do falls in love with Ba’s wife Sun Moon – the country’s greatest actress - and becomes a true hero.
This book arrived on my desk in January a few days after the death of the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Il. I thought, is this a sign? Certainly the book didn’t look promising, what with its claims to be the greatest North Korean love story ever told and the warning on the back that ‘any resemblance to real people and events may not be entirely coincidental’.
But there is a black ironic humour treading through this book where people’s knowledge of the outside world is so ignorant it is almost comical and where the Great Leader is bestowed all sorts of unimaginable deeds and where those make any wrong move are thrown into a terrible prison camp and have their identities erased or changed.
“In Prison 33, little by little, you relinquished everything, starting with your tomorrows and all that might be.”
The book, which is set in the recent past, is in some ways redolent of George Orwell’s 1984, not just in how Big Brother is always watching but in the love story that treads through the latter half of the book. You go from seeing Jun Do as a simple orphan and Everyman to someone who eventually becomes a true hero. It takes a while for Johnson to tell his story but it’s worth working through this book.
Johnson’s book uses the Everyman character of Jun Do to tell the story of North Korea from the ground level.
Adam Johnson invested a lot of research into finding out what life was like inside North Korea. He visited the country himself and read the testimonies of defectors who fled to the West.
It gives the book this edge of authenticity but then as a friend of mine who once visited North Korea told me, some of the things that happen there you just couldn’t make up. So you have in this books scenes that are comic book funny and then scenes, especially in the prison camp, that are terribly poignant and moving.
2. The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald (Penguin)
The Great Gatsby is going to be the novel of 2012.
There is the hit Broadway play, Gatz, with every single word of the novel on stage in eight hours.
There’s the Baz Luhrmann movie with Leonardo diCaprio and Carey Mulligan, which is in 3D.
There’s Careless People, a book about the events that inspired The Great Gatsby.
But first and last there is the novel – the greatest US novel of the 20th Century as many agree – which remains as fresh, as vivid and as relevant today as when it was published in 1925. In fact Gatsby’s fatal error is that he believes that success can be bought and measured in material terms.
The Great Gatsby is the story of Nick Carraway who drops into New York City in 1922 from the mid-west. His neighbour is the elusive, enigmatic and mysterious Great Gatsby. His cousin is Daisy Miller who falls in love again with Gatsby, five years after they first met. Her husband is having an affair and she falls desperately in love with Gatsby. But ultmately tragedy ensues. And you’re left with a bittersweet feeling.
This is the book of the Jazz Age. In fact Fitzgerald himself coined the phrase, the Jazz Age.
This is perhaps the most wonderful novel I’ve ever read.
Rereading it last week I was struck by how visual it is. How reading of Nick and Daisy and Gatsby you can see them so vividly: see how they live and where they live. In fact I thought was I just seeing it so vividly because of being so familiar with the screen versions but no, this language sings.
Baz Luhrmann might be making the 3D version but no movie – and there have been six at the last count, including a Korean adaptation – can capture the true beauty of this book.
When it was first published in 1925 The Great Gatsby was far from being a critical or popular success. Reviews were mixed at best and sales were slow. In fact when Fitzgerald died in 1940, copies of the second printing (a run of 3,000 from August 1925) were still in the warehouse.
But that all changed in the 1940s.
The Great Gatsby is quite a short novel. It is a splendid book. A weekend read you will not regret. Or easily forget.
