The characters spend much of the novel in disputation about the nature of faith and evil:

The novel is, in fact, dedicated to Camus and shares an epigraph with The Rebel, just as its dialogues on theodicy and endurance clearly take inspiration from The Plague as well as from Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov. Furthermore, the stakes are personal as well as political, since one of the murdered ministers is the religiously fanatical father of Lee’s best friend from school and now military colleague, the rebellious atheist Captain Park.Īs my summary should indicate, the thriller plot, while effective, is something of a veneer for a novel of ideas in the mode of the aforementioned Dostoevsky and Camus. Shin is telling the truth as his story about the massacre shifts. If word of that were to leak, it would harm the morale of the Christian Koreans whose spirit is needed in the fight against Communism.įrom this premise, a fast-paced narrative of investigation proceeds as Lee attempts to determine what actually happened to the ministers and whether or not in particular the saintly and tubercular Rev. Lee’s superior, the seemingly cynical (and anti-Christian) pragmatist Colonel Chang, wishes to use the execution as propaganda against “the Reds,” but he is worried that two survivors of the mass execution may have survived by collaborating or capitulating to the Communists. It opens in Pyongyang during the brief phases in which the South held the city, and it concerns the execution of twelve Christian ministers by the Communists on the eve of the war. The Martyred is set during the very early days of the Korean War and narrated by Captain Lee, a former university professor of humanities now serving in the army. But Kim’s talent is considerable, and it is good that Penguin Classics rescued The Martyred in 2011 from its undeserved post-Cold-War oblivion, not only because the consequences of the unfinished Korean War confront the world every day in the news, but also because it is a very good novel.

In 1955, he came to the U.S., and studied history, political science, writing, and Asian languages and literatures at a multitude of prestigious institutions-perhaps most notably the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and given what we now know about aspects of the Workshop’s political goals, the anticommunist novelist’s presence is, leaving his talent aside, perhaps no surprise. Kim was born in what is now North Korea in the 1930s, in the waning days of Japanese domination of the peninsula, and he fought on the side of the south during the Korean War. It dominated the bestseller list, earned comparisons to Camus and Dostoevsky, and boasted blurbs from Pearl S.

Kim’s The Martyred was published to great sales and acclaim in 1964.

The martyred richard kim