Book review: Nothing to envy: Real Lives in North Korea

Published on Sunday 21 February 2010 11:45

NOTHING TO ENVY: REAL LIVES IN NORTH KOREA Barbara Demick Granta, £14.99

COMPUTERS are rare in North Korea, and the internet, for most of its citizens, is little more than a whispered rumour. It's probable, in fact, that only one person surfs the web in North Korea without someone monitoring every click: Kim Jong-il, the authoritarian regime's supreme leader.

When he is online, and not lurking on sites devoted to his obsessions (movies, fancy food, young women, nuclear weapons), Kim must sometimes see what his country looks like to the rest of the world in those haunting satellite photographs of the Far East at night.

The countries near North Korea can be seen ablaze with splotches and pinpricks of light, with beaming civilisation. But North Korea, a country nearly half the size of the United Kingdom, is a black hole, an ocean of dark.

Barbara Demick begins her excellent new book by poring over these satellite images. She's shocked by them, and moved. "North Korea is not an undeveloped country," she observes. "It is a country that has fallen out of the developed world."

North Korea is not an easy country to observe. Few foreign journalists are allowed in, and then only with official minders and strictly limited itineraries.

To get a sense of how ordinary citizens live, writers must rely primarily on the accounts of defectors. If we have trouble seeing North Koreans plainly, they cannot see us at all. The country's citizens are force-fed a steady, numbing diet of state propaganda devoted to sustaining the personality cult of Kim Jong-il and savaging all things American.

Children learn a ditty called Shoot The Yankee Bastards in music class. One verse goes: "Our enemies are the American bastards / Who are trying to take over our beautiful fatherland /With guns that I make with my own hands / I will shoot them. BANG, BANG, BANG." (The truly poignant words here are "with my own hands".)

Demick's book is a lovely work of narrative non-fiction, one that follows the lives of six ordinary North Koreans, including a female doctor, a pair of star-crossed lovers, a factory worker and an orphan.

It's a book that offers extensive evidence of the author's deep knowledge of this country while keeping its sights firmly on individual stories and human details. The people Demick observes lived, before their defections, in north-eastern North Korea, far from the country's tidy, Potemkin village-like capital, Pyongyang.

The existences Demick describes sound brutal: there is often not enough food; citizens work long days that can be followed by hours of ideological training at night; spying on one's neighbours is a national pastime; a non-patriotic comment, especially an anti-Kim Jong-il wisecrack, can have you sent to a gulag for life, if not executed.

Demick writes especially well about the difficult lives of those who do manage to defect. Not only are they bewildered by life outside of North Korea, and have to be taught to do things such as how to use an ATM, but they also live with deep shame and guilt, knowing relatives left behind have probably been imprisoned as punishment for their escape.

North Koreans sometimes joke, Demick writes in Nothing To Envy, that they live like "frogs in the well". It's a line that sends you back to study those satellite images, and to contemplate those who dwell under Kim's inky moral darkness.

This article was originally published in Scotland on Sunday on 21 February 2010