In Irons: political prisoners and oppressive regimes

The second half of Adam Johnson's novel "The Orphan Master's Son" comes on as a bit of a surprise: at the end of the first section we're told, by the apparently unreliable narrator (whose point of view seems to be that of a North Korean official of sensibility?) that the protagonist of the first part, Jun Do, as he enters a North Korean prison camp, is never seen or heard from again. But as soon as we egin part 2, we know more than the narrator: the 2nd part of the novel is the interrogation of Commander Ga, and we know that Jun Do has been and is being mistaken for Ga - he has a tattoo on his chest of the image of the North Korean movie star - and Ga's wife - Sun Moon, so many assume that he must be Ga. We know otherwise. The narrative, which was a pretty straightforward account of Jun Do's life in part one, gets a little complex in part 2: there are two teams of interrogators, a bunch of old war veterans who just torture the subjects to draw confessions out of them through pain, and a more sophisticated modern group that uses psychology, though relies on pain as a final recourse. Jun Do has received excellent training in pain resistance. So on we go - mostly, this half of the novel seems to be an account of the horrible life in a North Korean prison, where the prisoners mostly mine for ore throughout the brutal seasons, especially the winter. We learn the story of this part of Jun Do's life in bits and pieces, out of sequence, as he confesses - and these are interlaced with chapters that are seemingly transcripts of NK radio broadcasts. The outline I have so far suggests the Jun Do escaped, impersonated Commander Ga, went to his home, met Sun Moon and her children, either abducted them or helped them escape to safety somewhere, and was caught - but these details may rove inaccurate. The novel has more a plot in the 2nd part, but its strength is still the vividness of its depiction of life within a horrible regime: it's a far more stark and graphic depiction of totalitarian prison than we;ve seen in other books of its kind over the years - from Darkness at Noon, Ivan Denisovitch, Gulag Archipelago, and onward. Or downward.