Globe & Mail reviews PYONGYANG!
Updated October 3, 2005
GRAPHIC MEMOIR
The last totalitarians
By NATHALIE ATKINSON
Saturday, October 1, 2005 Page D12
Pyongyang:
A Journey in North Korea
By Guy Delisle
Drawn & Quarterly,
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176 pages, $24.95
Pyongyang is a memoir that chronicles the two months in 2001 in which cartoonist Guy Delisle, a French-Canadian animator, lived in North Korea. He was there to supervise and direct episodes of a popular children's cartoon, but the subtext of his presence is grim. Traditional animation remains extremely labour-intensive, which is why productions have bounced around the globe, ending up in such seemingly unlikely places as North Korea. The memoir is topical, coming at a time when interest in the goings-on behind the last remaining panel of the Iron Curtain is high.
Delisle arrives in Pyongyang, a "phantom city in a hermit nation," armed with a CD player and a single book: George Orwell's 1984. He finds himself in a strange world. The streets are populated with trams and vintage 1950s Hungarian buses, and the countless citizens doing menial work, polishing stones or repainting a rusty bridge, are explained away as "volunteers."
Upon his arrival, he is assigned a comrade-guide and immediately taken on a pilgrimage, bouquet of flowers in hand, to the foot of a 22-metre bronze statue of Kim Il-Sung. The city is mysteriously, unnaturally, clean: "No loitering, no old folks chatting: total sterility." Inherent in the medium is a flair for highlighting the absurd, and he relates his situation to 1984 and The Prisoner television show.
The artwork is simple, seemingly just pencil lines and shading. Every face is a non-expressive cartoon reduction, and the economy of the drawing style is echoed in the writing. Coming from animation, Delisle is an efficient storyteller, making Pyongyang a brisk read, and an especially naturalistic one for readers unaccustomed to the visual medium. Large single-panel splash pages emphasize or punctuate points in the story. These pages are almost all of clichéd propaganda-type postcard images (the grand ballrooms, imposing monuments and large-scale performances glimpsed on newsreel footage), but in the context of Delisle's story, slyly underline the negative aspects of the regime.
When Delisle isn't flying paper airplanes out his hotel room window or finding new ways to escape his handlers (venturing into restricted-access areas such as the NGO, the embassy quarter and one particularly memorable escapade into a Chinese casino, where Koreans aren't allowed), he's encouraged to go on educational day trips to landmarks. There's the enormous Pyongyang International Cinema building (used only every two years to host visiting films), the rural International Friendship Exhibition (the last stop on a lone highway from the city built just for that purpose), where, he observes, "even here in the countryside, slogans line the rice paddies," and the monumental (and unfinished) 60-storey hotel nobody dares talk about, built when North Korea attempted to "co-host" the Seoul Olympics.
The episodes are smart, sharply observed and funny, without downplaying the untold horrors (death camps, starvation) that lurk around every corner. The situation in North Korea is surely horrible for the vast majority of the population, but Delisle doesn't pander to readers' expectations by directly chronicling it. In many ways, this oblique storytelling is one of the most refreshing aspects of the book.
While the subject matter and medium invite comparison to Joe Sacco's comics reportage on the Balkan conflict, Delisle clearly didn't travel to North Korea to be an investigative cartoonist. Instead, his cartoon panels chronicle the unique personal observations of that rare foreigner allowed to work within one of the totalitarian régime's foreign cash-grabbing schemes, presented in the form of a diary.
We learn about the country at the pace he does, whether he's stating that foreign workers occupy only two floors of a 50-storey hotel (incidentally, the only floors with electricity) or discovering that the quality of the hotel menu fluctuates depending on the importance of other foreigners visiting at the time. He has an eye for detail, from the portraits of the dynastic communist leaders hung at a slight downward angle to intensify the directness of their gaze to a night sky lit only by headlights (the only constant illumination is reserved for large-scale monuments to the two Kims).
Throughout his stay, he is struck by the ever-present portraiture of Kim Jong-Il, and tries to understand the country's weird combination of idealism and idolatry. Eventually, the ubiquitous portraits begin to unnerve him, so much so that he finally does a double-take walking by a mirror, thinking his reflection is Kim Jong-Il's before realizing it's a trick of the eye (and mind): It's only the leader's portrait on the wall behind him.
It's this sort of personal observation that makes the memoir so compelling, yet it's also a pity we never truly get a sense of the deeper impression the sojourn may have made on him. Instead, Delisle relies on the telling anecdote, especially the several chronicling the sheer bizarreness of interacting with his handlers. Attempts to cajole an honest answer from his dutiful, inscrutable handlers become a bit of a game. In the end, his victory is bittersweet: After weeks of trying to elicit an unscripted reaction, the only expression of true joy Delisle finally glimpses is when he presents them with his parting gift, a bottle of cognac.
That Delisle never manages to see underneath the façade may in fact be the most telling fact, and the most powerful. The people he encounters are living the reality of 1984, a fact he poignantly underscores with the book's endpapers. They are drawings of the vast, now-famous North Korean human pixel murals, the country's unseen thousands holding up placards and living in "mute, hidden terror."
Nathalie Atkinson is the Canadian correspondent for Publishers Weekly, and prefers to read books with pictures in them.
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