The image of a gun emplacement atop a suburban Piggly Wiggly, with "rifles, another RPG, and a machine gun that set up directly above the pig's head," has surprisingly little impact when it shows up late in Matt Ruff's The Mirage (Harper, Feb. 7). At this point, we're already in an alternate reality where Libyan Gov. Al Gaddafi has proclaimed his commitment to fighting global warming (and made passing reference to his role in inventing the Internet). In other words, Ruff has already dropped us in stranger places. That strangeness is the hook The Mirage relies on. Its closely woven carpet of surface details covers up a modestly functional standard-issue thriller. Up on the Piggly Wiggly, this world's insurgents are the fanatical Christian enemies of heroic Muslim occupying forces engaged in reluctant nation-building; their ambush kicks off a climactic action sequence in which our protagonist, Arab Homeland Security agent Mustafa Al Baghdadi, uncovers a conspiracy hidden deep within the corridors of power. That The Mirage shares DNA with airport-kiosk genre exercises is nothing to be ashamed of. A good thriller is hard to pull off, like mastering something esoteric and exacting — découpage, or a perfect soufflé. The ingredients, once they're combined in the correct ratios, are clear enough: propulsive action, sympathetic characterization, enough detail to ground the story without slowing things down, and some sort of hook. So it's strange that Ruff, whose résumé tends more toward the trippy and outlandish, nails the clichés but overplays his conceit. The constant foregrounding of the setting, especially through clumsy faux-Wikipedia chapter headings, ensures that the extended metaphor of the mirage overwhelms everything else. It's a dish dominated by just one spice.
Adam Johnson courts the same danger in The Orphan Master's Son (Random House, Jan. 10), set almost entirely within the cloud of suspicion and paranoia covering North Korea. Concrete-gray Pyongyang offers much less excitement than a counterfactual Baghdad, even if both require the same force of imagination to bring to life.
Johnson's rare visit to North Korea in 2007 hardly accounts for his comprehensively imagined country, or the way scarcity and insecurity permeate every corner of his characters' lives to the point where any other possibility becomes not just impossible, but irrelevant. Pak Jun Do, the title character, consistently declines opportunities to escape to the South or the West; he does so not entirely out of fear of retribution. "He was scared that if he saw it with his own eyes, his entire life would mean nothing. Stealing turnips from an old man who'd gone blind from hunger? That would have been for nothing. Sending another boy instead of himself to clean vats at the paint factory? For nothing."
Johnson's ability to conjure up and flesh out an idea of North Korea is impressive, and he pushes Jun Do through a series of roles and conflicts in the first half — from orphanage to tunnel combat, kidnap squads to radio surveillance — with a thriller's straightforward, tense economy. And that pays dividends when The Orphan Master's Son fractures in its second half.
Following the failure of a diplomatic mission to Texas that results in a prison sentence, Jun Do's story picks up a year later, and Johnson swaps his hero's forward progress for a jagged set of competing stories. Even as Jun Do steps into the powerful shoes of a man he may have killed, his story is tracked, contradicted and paralleled by two other narrators on two different timelines: the interrogator compiling his biography and the voice of the loudspeaker that sanitizes that biography for public consumption.
These narrators aren't universally successful, but Johnson largely triumphs at something more complicated — mirroring the double consciousness his characters have to develop in a divided country, and letting it infect the story.
