Set And Setting

I finally gave in and ordered Guy Delisle's Pyongyang: A Journey In North Korea after coming to the conclusion that I wasn't about to run into it anywhere locally, or even when I was in New York -- although I did settle for Delisle's The Burma Chronicles instead (not that it was settling by any means, as it was wonderful). But my long-standing fascination with the mysterious North Korea prodded me to order it online, and much of my spare time over the last week or so has consisted of reading and re-reading the French Canadian cartoonist's experiences during the months he spent in the capital city of Pyongyang working in an animation studio while trying to adapt to a culture and country that very few foreigners, and even fewer Americans, have ever seen.

Delisle recounts his thoughts and observations with a tremendous amount of humor, even when his stark pencil drawings depict the grey world in which he probably feels he must laugh at in order to not go insane. In a totalitarian country with one of the most disparate distributions of wealth on the planet, many of the citizens are drawn in silhouette when inside buildings or walking the streets at night, as North Korea is shrouded in darkness in over 99% of the land. There is an unspeakable eeriness invoked in scenes such as Delisle, hunched over his desk in his room at the Yanggakdo Hotel, squinting as he attempts to draw under a single dim light bulb while outside his hotel room window at night there is only the lone, frightening spectre of the Juche Tower rising out of the oppressive blackness.

Most frightening of all, it would appear, is the constant, unrelenting propaganda machine that is the daily regime under Kim Jong-il, whose visage is plastered everywhere you turn. Visiting foreigners are required first thing, when entering the city, to pay homage to the towering statute of Jong-il's late father, North Korean founder Kim Il-sung, where your appointed guide provides you with flowers to lay at his feet. Delisle, like all visitors, is assigned a local guide, ostensibly to show him around the city but probably more likely to keep him from wandering anywhere he shouldn't -- or more to the point, seeing anything he shouldn't. Photography is tolerated to a minimum in North Korea, and your film could be confiscated on a whim. Your guide, on the other hand, may suffer more serious consequences for allowing it to happen in the first place.

Delisle, however, does have the luxury to laugh at this backwards world, where even the people walk backwards ("reverse walking" as they call it) and the children dump buckets of water on the public lawns "for fun". In a universe where every pop song on the radio is about Kim Jong-il, where the gardens bloom with "kimjongilias", where even the so-called birth home of Kim Jong-il sits in proud display in the city, despite the universally known fact that Jong-il was actually born in the Soviet Union, one can't help wonder how much a North Korean's opinions are brainwashed due to their absolute isolation, or rooted in fear for their lives if they even dare to think differently. When Delisle asks his guide why he never sees either old or disabled people in North Korea, the guide states without the slightest hint of irony or doubt, that all Koreans are born healthy, intelligent, and strong. And nothing more was said. Because as far as he was concerned, that answered that troubling quandary to his satisfaction. Not, however, to Delisle's. Or to ours.

I cannot recommend this book enough. For the humor. For the narrative. For the travelogue. And most importantly, for the piece of mind one gets to close the pages and breathe a sigh of relief, that we live in a country, unlike that of North Korea, where we all can enjoy a story such as this.