Upon arrival at my hotel in Hong Kong after a few weeks in Shenzhen, China, I raced to a pub. While reading John le Carre’s “The Honourable Schoolboy” and waiting on some fish and chips, an Englishman politely took the seat beside me. After some halting pleasantries, I realized he worked for a company to which I had just caused considerable (though necessary) trouble in my role as a corporate lawyer. We laughed and, to his credit, he remained as polite after learning that fact as he was before it. Yes, I wondered if it was truly the coincidence that it seemed to be -- but it was just that, a coincidence. As a heavy user of spy and mystery fiction, though, I have periodically revisited that night to consider the darker possibilities that such an incident might have engendered; and I thought again of that night recently while rereading “A Corpse in the Koryo” by James Church, which is about spies and lies and North Korea.
For those working to divine North Korea’s strategy and tactics in its seemingly absurdist-play dealings with the rest of the world, fiction should serve as one resource among many. In negotiations, North Korea tends to use the same game plan that it has historically relied on because it works. You probably don’t need me to rehash its methods, but I do think we need to be reminded from time to time that North Korea is a real place with real people -- people with pride, emotions and a sense of history. There are plenty of quotes that observe how fiction negotiates terrain that other texts cannot, so we might as well settle upon an epigram from an absurdist -- Camus wrote that fiction “is the lie through which we tell the truth.” Through artifice, Church’s Inspector O series grants the reader access to the multilayered, real North Korea.
The series is set in both North Korea and China’s Jilin Province (the region of Northeast China that borders North Korea and that is home to many ethnic Koreans), and Inspector O is used to lies, and gray, and weary and wary intrigue. Church (the pseudonym of a former “Western intelligence officer”) knows North Korea, and he’s a gifted writer who presents that land in crisp, unhurried prose and who breathes life into a believable, worldly Pyongyang inspector in North Korea’s Ministry of People’s Security. O is a well-traveled anthropologist of North Korea who wants no advice from foreigners. Nietszche said, “You must not want to see everything.” O doesn’t want to but he does.
After le Carre established the contours of serious contemporary spy fiction, writers aspiring to a similar status seem to fear both coherence and any discernible action. In presenting a believable North Korea, Church must trade in a bit of the “nothing is as it seems” milieu; but, luckily for the reader, O is too blunt and obstinate for his own good (he refuses to habitually wear the obligatory pin that demonstrates a zealous fealty to the Kim dynasty), which makes it easier to follow the plots and attendant satellite plots of the novels. Church serves up good mysteries that make as much sense at the end as one could hope for, but the characters and setting are what render the series a potentially transformative tool.
As the Trump, Moon and Xi governments grapple in their varying ways with North Korea, reading about Inspector O could serve as a medicinal corrective to much of the media’s and the government’s recurring diagnosis that North Korea is irrational and unknowable. The Inspector O books are in no way a defense of North Korea but, rather, include (among other things) a learned indictment grounded in experience, bleakness and acuity. So the series could serve as one causeway to a more knowing and useful engagement of North Korea. Inspector O is savvy and steely and imbued with a buried sadness beyond explication and, ultimately, exiled. He is, it would seem, a North Korean that Church has met. He is prickly, kind, obstinate, proud, odd, unkind, funny and ready to get the job done. He’s real.
Church provides elegant reminders throughout the series that North Korea is an heir to an ancient civilization. For example, Church cites Korean poetry from the 14th century, and Inspector O’s relationship with and respect for wood seems informed by Shamanism. North Korea can make its connection to thousands of years of history easy to forget, but the state’s juche (“self-reliance”) philosophy and dystopian tactics derive at least in part from and are reactions to the grievances of Korean history -- a modern example being Japan’s colonization of the peninsula, which lasted until the end of World War II. For those negotiating with or trying to grasp the North Koreans, Church’s novels could serve as a means to step back and look past the zany belligerence.
In any negotiation, knowing what the other party wants and why should be a baseline element for any preparation thereof. Approaching North Korea as so sui generis as to belie the utility of learning may be temporarily satisfying but is ultimately self-defeating. Be prepared. There are many great books and essays that could help: South Korean universities, such as Yonsei, and think tanks offer some of the best analysis on North Korea; “The Two Koreas” by Don Oberdorfer is also a great primer; other worthwhile entries include “A Most Enterprising Country” by Justin Hastings and the various websites dedicated to North Korean studies, such as NK News. Of course, there are also many memoirs by and treatments of defectors, many of whom spent time in North Korean prison camps. The well-crafted tales of Inspector O’s pursuits should be added to the syllabus.
Robert Sands Robert Sands is a global transportation lawyer based in the United States. -- Ed.
