The Sorcerer of Pyongyang

Cho Jun-su is an eleven-year-old school boy in North Korea when he finds a Dungeons and Dragons rulebook. Written in English, the book remains an excessively wordy, not too interesting comic book until he gives it to a teacher. The teacher translates enough of the book to let them play a version they call the House of Possibility. This sets the course of the rest of Cho’s life. He becomes a poet, and as a teenager wins a nation-wide contest, besting another poet who will also have significant influence in Cho’s life. His success leads to attendance at Kim Il-sung University. At University he introduces his friends to House of Possibility, which starts the roller coaster that will be the rest of his life in North Korea.

For a short book (240 pages), Theroux puts together an interesting structure. He flashes the knife in the first few pages when he describes a leftist professor (“the world’s leading English-speaking expert in Juche thought”) and his son, who leaves the rulebook behind in a hotel room. Then he puts the knife away and turns to grade-school primers to describe Cho’s early life (the professor, and the knife, come back towards the end, but by that time he’s well out of the story). The change in tone disappoints, and becomes annoying right up to Cho’s witnessing a school-yard demonstration of the other side of the government’s hand. Thereafter the writing echoes Cho’s growth and maturation, although there’s a confusing crack in the narrative around the mid-point that foreshadows the end of the book.

Apart from the carpentry with which Theroux assembles The Sorcerer of Pyongyang, the story is carried by Cho and the North Korean government. Cho, despite his obvious intuition and imagination, remains modest and calm. One mark to lay against Cho might be his saintliness in situations that call for, at least, lacerating irony. Instead, he gets a grip on himself, thinks himself down, and responds with phlegmatic political cant. But even this behavior serves, adding credibility to Cho’s actions at the end of the story. Oddly, despite their butchery, the North Korean government provides much of the humor to be found in Sorcerer. There’s Dear Leader, being driven here and there, offering on-the-spot suggestions for improvement. There’s also the analogies, handled with a mercifully light touch, between the fantasy worlds constructed by dungeon masters and the government.