Our Twisted Hero: A review

The World Wide Web, vast as it is, does not provide a lot of information (in English anyway) about Yi Munyol. One understands quickly from various sources that his father defected to North Korea during the civil war, leaving his family behind. This seminal event is held up as a principal reason Yi became a novelist with a political bent. And Our Twisted Hero, which was the first of his books to be translated into English, is an insightful allegory into autocratic rule, and the complicity of the individual.

Our Twisted Hero is set in a Korean elementary school, which will no doubt bring up comparisons to Lord of the Flies, in that the boys of the class are under minimal parental supervision (In Our Twisted Hero's case, a poor teacher), and so are free create their own moral universe. Han Pyong'tae has just transferred in to a rural school from Seoul, where he was one of the most gifted students. He finds, however, that this new rural school has a different order than in Seoul. Here, the class is run by the monitor, Om Sokdae, a boy a few years older than the rest of the class.

Om Sokdae rules the class with a system of tacit menace, and forces the other students to pay tribute to him under the threat of physical beatings and social ostracism. Han tries to disrupt the social order, but is driven to exile; eventually, like the hero of Koestler's Darkness at Noon, or Winston Smith of Orwell's 1984, he is broken, and accepts his new place in the totalitarian order he finds himself. Although, unlike those novels, the story does not end there. Sokdae is eventually loses power over the classroom, though the effects of his rule haunt Han for many years and imbue him with a dark cynicism as South Korea grows into an industrial, western-style economy where people like Om Sokdae are able to flourish.

The parallels to Korean politics and social order are insightful and frightening. South Korea, I have since learned, was led by a series of strongman presidents from the end of the civil war (1950) until as recently as 1987, the year this book was published. So the student's complicity in Om Sokdae's rule are parallel not only to the North's brutality, but to the system many contemporary South Koreans grew up under. In fact, Yi's insights on authority, self-determination, and the vigilance necessary to sustain a free society - and its implications on the role of violence in maintaining order - are relevant everywhere.