45 of 48 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Wonderful thriller, October 27, 2006
I read A Corpse in the Koryo a year ago in manuscript form, sent to me my Mr Church's editor. I loved it.
Inspector O is an endearing character, with a mix of necessary pragmatism and romanticism, as well as authentic complexity.
It's not just the milieu (North Korea) that appeals--though that certainly does, taking the reader to a place few know at all. More, it's the writing--a beautifully honed minimalism that nonetheless evokes its scenes with great detail. I love it when writers are able to leave room for the reader's imagination. It takes talent to know where to leave those spaces, and James Church has plenty of such talent.
If you like fine writing, eye-opening characters and locales, and a quiet but purposeful intelligence wrapped inside a thrilling story, get ready to go to Church.
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24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A look inside North Korea, January 2, 2007
This is really outstanding. I picked this up after seeing it mentioned in a newspaper article, and didn't put it down until I finished.
At a basic level, it is a startling but entirely plausible depiction of daily life in contemporary North Korea. I have no experience in North Korea so cannot assess its accuracy, but most of the key elements ring true: the factionalism, the bureaucracy, the bungling, the corruption, the role of personal connections, the brutality, and the lack of resources. One of the most features of this depiction is that the author does it entirely through the dialogue, the action, and the details, not through the long and pedantic expository passages that are usually the downfall of novels that seek to introduce the reader to another society. Thus, for example, the protagonist's effort to cross an intersection without using a pedestrian underpass turns into a wonderful lesson in daily life in Pyongyang.
The characters all seem authentic. They are not automatons dedicated to Dear Leader, or closeted reformers who all secretly yearn for change. Rather, they struggle to make the most of a very bad situation, without giving much thought to great and abstract issues. Again, I have never been to North Korea, and have only met a few North Koreans, very briefly and quite some time ago, so I can't give a definitive assessment, but based on my previous experience in another socialist country before it began to reform in earnest, it all rings true.
The book stands on its own as a good novel, which cannot always be said about detective fiction set in exotic or historical locations. The protagonist and other main characters are all fully realized and three-dimensional. Even minor characters like hotel clerks, cleaning ladies, and tour guide who appear only briefly are deftly sketched and vivid. The protagonist, while not a hero in the typical sense and in some ways not even very likable, is nevertheless a sympathetic character, as are many of the other main characters.
Along those lines, the complex narrative structure is quite clever, a sort of story within a story and it's a pleasant surprise that someone who appears to be a first-time author pulls off such a feat. The author, like Xiaolong Qiu, also pulls off the difficult feat of writing a gripping police procedural in a setting where at some level there is no procedure as we would understand it, and where the resolution of the case has more to do with the configuration of the players involved and their relative power. I'm not sure I followed all the twists of the plot, and am unclear about how at least a few of the characters fit in, but in this Kafkaesque world, it didn't matter.
This success at writing a procedural in a setting without procedure stands in contrast with many of the procedurals I have read that are set in Italy. In those procedurals, personal connections also seem to be as important as the facts, and yet with the exception of the Inspector Montalbano mysteries, I have always found them a disappointment.
While others have compared this very good novel to Martin Cruz Smith's "Gorky Park", I would like to suggest another analogy: Graham Greene's novels, in particular what he referred to as his "entertainments." Graham Greene spent time in intelligence, as apparently the author of this novel did, and it showed. His "entertainments" were thrillers that addressed larger themes and were populated with complex and morally ambiguous characters. While it has been a long time since I read "Gorky Park," a novel which I remember enjoying immensely, I thought that in some ways "Corpse in the Koryo" was actually more ambitious.
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30 of 37 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
"Forget it Inspector O, it's Pyongyang.", May 18, 2007
This debut novel from a psuedonymous American intelligence officer has one big thing going for it -- an unfamiliar setting. Its protagonist is "Inspector O", a North Korean policeman who becomes entangled in a feud between rival North Korean intelligence units and must bob and weave to avoid ending up caught dead in the crossfire. While the book does an admirable job of giving a sense of the daily emptiness of life under a totalitarian regime, the plotting is rather oblique, and those expecting a standard mystery or thriller will likely leave disappointed. The story is told through a fairly clumsy framework, as Inspector O sits in a safe house in Prague being "interviewed" by an Irishman apparently working for MI5. Through this interview, which sometimes previews plot points (such as the deaths of central characters), Inspector O tells the story. Unfortunately it's never explained why the Inspector is being interviewed in this manner, and the format only detracts from any suspense.
The tale Inspector O tells is of how, after a routine stakeout operation, he is gets pushed all over the map by his direct superior and the mysterious intelligence operative named "Kang." It's all very unclear, since no one tells the inspector anything beyond "go there, wait here, etc." and the reader is simply tagging along from point A to point B in equal bewilderment. Fortunately the inspector is an appealing figure -- the grandson of a war hero, he's filled with a sardonic, but not overly rebellious, attitude toward those in power. It would have been easy to make him a cardboard closeted reformer, but the author wisely avoids that route, instead making him a somewhat romantic soul, resigned to a hard life and seeking solace and life in small chunks of wood. There's also a wry subplot, which I'm sure is a homage to a classic pulp story (just can't recall which one), about his inability to score a cup of tea throughout the whole book.
Eventually it becomes clear that the factional maneuvering which is the cause of Inspector O's being moved all over the place has something to do on one level with a scheme to smuggle cars from South Korea to China, and on another level, with diplomatic moves to "right old wrongs" between North Korea and Japan. (Potential readers will find it especially useful to learn about North Korea's kidnapping of Japanese citizens in the late '70s and early '80s before starting the book.) However by the time the book sputters to the end, many will have lost interest in the subtlties of all this and said "Forget it Inspector O, it's Pyongyang." The North Korean setting is reasonably interesting, and Inspector O is reasonably engaging, but the plotting and pace of the book leave a great deal to be desired.
Note: Those interested in fiction from North Korea should check out the recent anthology "Literature from the Axis of Evil and Other Enemy Nations" and the September 2003 edition of Words Without Borders.
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