Three-hundred-forty years ago, John Milton published Paradise Lost and started one of the longest running literary arguments in the western world. In its opening lines, Milton says he wants the epic poem to “justify the ways of God to men.” But just about everyone agrees that his God is, at best, an uptight bore and, at worst, a tyrant. The character of Satan, on the other hand, comes off like a cross between Hamlet and Frank Langella’s Dracula. He’s ambitious yet introspective, wrathful but also debonair. And he gets all the best lines.

Scholars, preachers and poets have squabbled for centuries over the reasons for Milton’s apparent fondness for the arch fiend. William Blake said Milton, being a poet, was naturally on the devil’s side, even if he didn’t know it. Others brought up Milton’s own role in a failed rebellion during England’s Civil War, and named Oliver Cromwell as a model for Satan. TS Eliot decided that the whole poem just wasn’t very good.

One of the more novel approaches to the work came from lit-crit bad boy Stanley Fish. Fish said Milton meant to make Satan so narratively seductive to prove a point about language. Language itself, Fish claimed, is corrupt (Tower of Babel, anyone?) and, because of that inherent corruption, any attempt to depict the celestial struggle between Heaven and Hell will always wind up making Satan look good and God look bad. The whole game is rigged, see? Trying to use words to describe God is a literary Three-Card Monte with Satan himself palming the Ace.

As I read Jia, the debut novel from South Korea-born author, Hyejin Kim, Fish’s hypothesis kept dancing over my mind’s eye like a hair on a film reel. Written in English and set in the famine-stricken hellhole of 1990’s North Korea, Kim’s book seems to set itself up for a Paradise Lost-style fall. Namely, how can language— let alone the English language— haul our pampered North American imaginations into the dark heart of the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea? Can words even begin to make our western brains, gorged as they are with namby-pamby conceits about humanism and Lockean notions of the self, see through the eyes of someone reared first in a slave labor camp and then in a state-sponsored orphanage?

In the case of Kim’s novel, I am afraid the answer to these questions is probably no. But that does not mean the book is not worth reading. Anyone interested in North Korea, or in that 20th century fever-dream known as Stalinism, should buy a copy, if they dare.

Because of her father’s subversive activities, Jia, the book’s titular narrator, begins life in a harsh internment camp in the mountains. A wheeling series of good and bad breaks takes her away from her outcast family and into the capital city to work as a dancer. But she must conceal her true background and pose as an orphan. In late-century North Korea, the “wavering classes” are not just shunned, they are often left to die. And as famine closes over the countryside and desperate refugees stream into the capital, her secret becomes even more lethal. When it comes out, she must flee for her life, like thousands of others, across the border and into China.

Jia is a careful, wide-eyed observer. Her measured prose, combined with the increasingly bleak world of starvation and terror around her, creates a very weird effect; like standing in the middle of a hurricane while someone calmly chops onions. A good example occurs later in the novel. In a railway station near the border with China, Jia mistakes dead famine victims for weary passengers: “Some leaned their heads on the person next to them, their eyes closed tight, while others gazed blankly in front of them.” We know before Jia does that these wretches have expired. But her innocence and her understated description add to the horror, and the surreal atmosphere, of the moment.

Yet Kim never whets the edges of her main character. We know she is a kind person, even an exceptionally kind person, but beyond that, she remains as flat as Milton’s God and as opaque as her mysterious country itself. For instance, while living in Pyongyang, Jia dates an odious soldier named Seunggyu who, at one point, calls the starving lower classes “useless vermin.” Unbelievably, Jia confesses her secret to him, the fact that she comes from those same lower classes, and is shocked when he snitches on her to the authorities.

These kinds of details leave the reader asking the same question over and over: If a person grows up in a crushingly intrusive society like North Korea, would she not internalize at least some of its tenets and practices, or its secrecy? Could she possibly remain as innocent and credulous as Kim presents her here, or would the cynicism and paranoia all around her at the very least cause her to grow a thicker psychic armor? On a more practical level, would she really reveal such a crucial secret to anyone, let alone to a brainwashed apparatchik like Seunggyu? Perhaps she would, but the reasons for such behavior would have to be rooted in deeper, more abstruse psychological territory than Kim appears willing, or able, to brave.

In the Introduction to Jia, Kim tells of meeting a North Korean immigrant in China. The woman and her story, she says, became the foundations of the novel. A journalist by trade, Kim seems more interested in recounting the woman’s story than in using the tools of fiction to deliver readers into her mind. As a result, the entire book reads like it could have quotes around it, as if it came out in one long, formal speech from a stranger on a bus (which, in a way, it did). This constant feeling of being inside the story, by virtue of the gripping and tragic events it relates, but simultaneously outside of it because we have no real access to the main character’s inner life, winds up creating an almost dreamlike sense of disassociation.

That weird estrangement is frustrating, to be sure. But, in a way, it mirrors what many of us feel about North Korea itself. The reclusive and brutal land continually defies our comprehension. Perhaps Fish was right. Language really cannot bridge certain gaps in human understanding. And even though Jia’s story is ultimately about breaking through barriers, maybe we will always be stuck behind a DMZ of culture and geography and circumstance. The whole idea makes me queasy and uncomfortable. And that, more than anything, might be what makes Jia the next book you should read.

——
JB Powell is the author of The Republic: A Novel and a contributing writer at P+P. Thumbnail by Mark.

Tags: hyejin kim, jia, north korea