City of Ash and Red by Hye-Young Pyun, translated by Sora Kim-Russell

Arcade Publishing, 2018 (English-language translation copyright), originally published by Changbi Publishers, 2010

ISBN-13: 978-1628727814

Available: Hardcover, Kindle edition

City of Ash and Red has obvious similarities to the work of Franz Kafka, although it’s more brutal, violent, and stomach-turning Anonymous protagonists and locations, endless bueraucracy, mazes leading nowhere, characters seized by authority for unclear reasons, indifferent or servile characters… all of these can be found in

Kafka’s work.  However, Hye-Young Pyun’s novel personalizes her nameless protagonist, known only as “the man”, and sets him down in an apocalyptic society filled with disease, fear, garbage, brutality, and indifference. However, while this could be an issue of translation (this is not to criticize the translator, she certainly had a difficult job), City of Ash and Red lacks Kafka’s absurdism, instead using elements of his work to create an unrelenting, nightmarish situation. I have not read the author’s other work, or Korean fiction in general, in the past, so I can’t say whether this is either representative of Joon’s work or common in Korean fiction. Knowledge of Korean culture and language would almost certainly be helpful, as I’m sure her work is influenced by other Korean writers.

The protagonist has been transferred to an overseas branch of the pesticide company he works for, due to his proficiency at killing rats, in a country known only as “Country C.” (the irony of her protagonist being a vermin-killer surely is a response to Kafka’s story “The Metamorphosis”) An epidemic is traveling through Country C, leaving the city in chaos, filled with trash, and sprayed regularly with clouds of toxic pesticide. On arrival, the man is quarantined due to his having a fever, then released, but when notified of this, the person responsible for his incomprehensible transfer puts him on a 10 day leave to make sure he has recovered. His suitcase stolen, the man is trapped in his apartment when his entire building is quarantined. Alienated from his coworkers, divorced from his ex-wife, and friendless, he is unable to contact or communicate with anyone in his home country to alert them to his situation, and with his cell phone missing, he has no contact information for Mol, the contact at his new place of employment. When he does finally get through to someone, he is unpleasantly surprised to learn that his ex-wife and dog were found murdered in his apartment. Afraid he will be arrested, he escapes his apartment building and becomes a homeless vagrant, with rat-killing his only useful skill, unable to contact anyone from the company he works for due to the bureaucracy it takes to get an appointment and the new procedures in place to protect people from infection. With his limited knowledge of the language, the people around him are incomprehensible, the trash-filled streets are a a maze, and a fear of infection is ever-present. The trash becomes such a problem that spraying it is not enough to control the rats, so the city starts burning the trash, leaving the ruined city covered in grey ash and red flames (in an interview, Pyun indicated that this is where the book’s title came from). It becomes impossible to tell whether what is going on in his mind is reality, paranoia, or both.

The man’s skill at rat-killing gets him recruited as an exterminator and offers him a little more stability and protection, but as a paranoid, violent, and alienated individual, it’s not clear that this is a good thing. His continued attempts to communicate with anyone through public telephones are failures (interestingly, the word for public telephones in Korean can also be read as “midair”, a nuance that is lost in translation) and as the people of the city adapt to their new reality, he adopts the name Mol (a Chinese character that means “to disappear”, another nuance lost in translation), finally resigning himself to a daily life of futility, loneliness, and meaninglessness, running in circles or hiding in the shadows, like a rat.

It’s to her credit that Hye-Young Pyun is actually able to make her protagonist at all sympathetic, mostly through flashbacks that document his unfair treatment by his coworkers and distance from his wife, and the frustrations and fears that readers themselves may have of such things as being seized by the government, abandoned in an unfamiliar location, robbed, and deprived of the ability to communicate. While it may be unclear as to whether the protagonist killed his ex-wife, it is clearly stated that he raped her and put her in an abusive situation, and he is responsible for the brutal death of at least one other person in addition to the gory details of his rat-killing. Thankfully, Pyun chose to write as a distant, third-person narrator instead of from the protagonist’s point of view. As someone with a particular revulsion to rats (thanks to George Orwell’s terrifying rat scene in 1984) this made the book really difficult for me to finish.

City of Ash and Red goes far beyond Kafka’s existentialist dystopias, and pulls the reader into a more horrific and gruesome arena. Despite his namelessness, I just can’t interpret the protagonist an “everyman”, unless the author’s point is that regardless of what we think of ourselves, we all are terrible people, each of us both victims and victimized, and lost to each other (I refuse to be that pessimistic). If you’re looking for a fast-paced, action-packed narrative, you will want to look elsewhere, but while I disliked the main character and what he represented, Pyun is a talented and effective writer whose vivid descriptions create a compelling, if terrible, world, and for those who have a strong stomach and a liking for dystopian fiction, this is a book you won’t want to miss. Recommended.

Contains: rape, murder, violence, gore, burning people alive, animal killing

Editor’s note: For a little more information on Hye-Young Pyun, click here.