The Accusation; The Vegetarian

     

"Bandi" is the pen-name of a North Korean writer, whose collection of stories was smuggled out of that country and published this year. I assumed there was a story in the collection with the title "The Accusation"; it wasn't until halfway through the last story, "The Red Mushroom", that I took a look at the contents page and realised there wasn't. So where did the anthology's overall title came from? There was certainly an accusation, a denunciation, in "The Red Mushroom", but it wasn't the centre of that story. Finally it dawned on me: these stories are Bandi's accusation against the North Korean regime, and against Communism, the "red mushroom".

My knowledge of history and politics is pretty weak, so don't ask me whether Communism could work in theory. I only know that, in practice, it's been a catastrophe. In North Korea especially it seems to have become a machine for destroying citizens for the stupidest of reasons, from guilt "inherited" from family members to denunciations over hysterical trivia ("City of Spectres") or for personal gain ("The Red Mushroom").

More than once I thought of the dystopia of Orwell's 1984 - but there is a difference: as Kim Seong-dong's Afterword remarks, the fact that there are prose writers and poets whose writing criticises the regime suggests the possibility and hope of the regime's end. Some of Bandi's characters come to realise that the system they're living under is unfair and corrupt, and recognise their collusion, voluntary or involuntary. Although they can never say it aloud, just the fact that they understand this, as resistance writers like Bandi do, suggests that, as Kim Seong-dong remarks, "cracks" are appearing what seemed like "an impregnable fortress".

While Bandi's stories deal with the concrete day-to-day struggles of North Koreans, Han Kang's anthology The Vegetarian, set in South Korea, seems much more internal and psychological. However, Kang is also making an accusation. The eponymous story is, I think, the strongest, telling the story of a woman who suddenly refuses to eat meat. "The Vegetarian" is told by the woman's exasperated husband, who is baffled and enraged by his wife's inconveniently odd behaviour, as are her family and his business associates. We get glimpses of the nightmare that haunts her, with hints that she feels complicit in her father's abuse. She swallowed that abuse for years; suddenly she can't swallow any more. It's a terrible indictment of some of the worst aspects of South Korean society, its patriarchy, its enforced conformity. To me, the first story was so impactful that the other two stories in the collection, which follow on from it, feel like unnecessary extensions. (I have Han Kang's novel Human Acts and look forward to reading it.)