Guy Delisle's Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea has been out for a few years, but they've just done another printing in the UK, which is good enough for me.

Delisle is an animator from Quebec.  Thanks to the miracle of outsourcing, he spent several months in Pyongyang, supervising the production of a French kids' cartoon which had been contracted out to the plucky, and extremely inexpensive, North Koreans.  Not strictly a graphic novel - is the term really apt to cover non-fiction? - Pyongyang is a memoir of the time he spent there.

Roughly 23 million people live in North Korea, and they aren't having much fun.  The country is one of the most bizarre and disturbing places on the planet, simply in terms of the extent to which human society has been distorted there.  Much of what goes on in North Korea is mysterious, since the government has done a very good job of keeping the outside world at bay.

The country isn't completely closed.  Economic necessity means that trade delegations, aid workers, and people like Delisle are allowed into the country.  However, as far as humanly possible, they are kept separated from the public.  Wandering the streets without a guide is strongly discouraged.  Interacting with the North Koreans, outside the scope of work, is virtually impossible.  And those North Koreans who will speak to you will stick, unfailingly, to the party line.  They love North Korea.  They love Kim Il-Sung.

Pyongyang doesn't really have a plot, as such, but it's a compelling and witty examination of a truly weird place.  Even the Soviet Union at its worst had an underground culture, but there seems to be no evidence of that in North Korea.  Art and entertainment have been effectively eradicated and replaced with bizarre tributes to Kim Jong-Il and Kim Il-Sung.  All the music on the radio is about the great leaders.  All the films are about the revolutionary struggle.  There is simply nothing else.

Delisle compellingly and wittily explores how this bizarre place works.  One obvious question is, can the North Koreans truly believe everything they say?  Even Delisle isn't sure, but he lays out the evidence for you.  Plainly, unless they're utterly delusional, the population can't believe all of the nonsense they're told about the prosperity of their great country.  But they do seem to buy into the cult of personality.  Then again, perhaps that's how the North Koreans in question got the job of meeting foreigners.  Who can tell?

The country is truly Orwellian.  Not only is it a totalitarian dictatorship, but the government is clearly engaged in a massive, Newspeak-style project to narrow horizons and to exclude alternatives from the intellectual vocabulary.  One possibility is that the North Koreans may well not recognise the full scale of their country's deceit; their frame of reference has been distorted too badly.  The other possibility is that they know full well, but are living in fear.  Or perhaps it's a bit of both; North Koreans certainly know what awaits them if they step out of line.

This ought to be utterly depressing subject matter, but it's captivating in its strangeness.  And Delisle finds plenty of black comedy in the sheer baffling ineptitude of North Korea.  The government may be great at propaganda for the domestic audience, but it squanders its assets on demented vanity projects, and seems to delusionally believe that it might somehow manage to convince visitors of the glory of the North Korean way.  Delisle explains, in beautiful detail, the absurdities of the luxury hotels for foreigners, built on a massive scale and yet operated by people who have absolutely no idea what luxury actually involves.

He also refuses to play ball from time to time when called upon to voice his support for the regime - and gets away with it.  It seems that the North Koreans know better than to punish that sort of infraction from foreign visitors - especially because they're being kept quarantined from all but the specially trained.

This is a truly excellent book, which succeeds admirably in bringing North Korea to life - such as it is, in that country.

Rating: A+

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