Review of The Sorcerer of Pyongyang by Marcel Theroux

While Russia is currently doing its best, unfortunately, to take the mantle of World's Shittiest Regime, the global consensus is that North Korea is the current title holder. Reality all too harsh for the majority of its population and all too egotistical for the extreme minority in power, the stories coming out of the Asian country are often heartbreaking. Poverty, food shortages, illness, tyranny, oppression, nuclear saber-rattling—this list of things remains part of everyday existence for most North Koreans. No secret either, the country's conditions are well-known to anyone who pays even the slightest attention to news. What then could be the hook of a novel about a young man raised in North Korea? In such conditions, the potential reader is thinking: Here we go, a feel-really-good or feel-really-bad story about a victim of North Korea. What could Marcel Theroux have to offer the reader in The Sorcerer of Pyongyang (2022)? Don't make the mistake of assuming black or white. The novel is color—of the hounds of hell, wizard spells, and gleaming treasure variety.

The Sorcerer of Pyongyang begins in the nineties in the childhood of a boy named Cho Jun-su. Jun-su's father works in one of the only hotels catering to foreign tourists, and one day becomes the unwitting owner of a Dungeons & Dragons manual that a guest accidentally left behind. Thinking nothing of it, he gives the manual to his son, Jun-su. While Jun-su initially dismisses the exotic images of demons and wizards as capitalist propaganda, through a chance encounter he takes part in a mini D&D campaign. And his mind is blown. The role-playing game allows him to imagine a whole other world. Growing older, Jun-su takes the manual with him. As a university student, he makes friends and builds a group of D&D players. And with the evolution of North Korea and change of dictators pushing him forward (and sometimes under), Jun-su rides the wave to an existence no reader can predict.

To answer the question posed in the introduction, Theroux gives the reader every reason to read The Sorcerer of Pyongyang beyond feeling good and bad. The prose is effortlessly precise—a joy to read in itself. Jun-su's story is always on point (i.e. no digressions to “educate” the reader), appropriately personal (i.e. not maudlin or deeply subconscious) and impossible to predict one chapter to the next. And the gray ending avoids any major comedy or tragedy readers may fear is waiting. It's just imminently readable, first page to last.

While The Sorcerer of Pyongyang describes the major life events of Jun-su—from a young boy on through to old age, in a nice twist Dungeons & Dragons is actually an anchor to his reality. What Jun-su calls “The House of Possibility”, the game is a launch pad for imagination, in turn juxtaposing the fantasy elements of the North Korean regime. The manner in which Theroux utilizes this juxtaposition is not overly sentimental, tearjerking, or realized on screen. There is no D&D session among friends with a cut scene of tanks on parade and missiles firing behind it. There is every opportunity for such bleeding heart moments, but Theorux takes Jun-su and North Korea at face value, relaying ideas and story in straight-forward fashion instead, including the D&D.

As his father was so often able to, Marcel Theroux effectively captures a person—a true character portrait—in The Sorcerer of Pyongyang. Through subtleties and little details, Cho Jun-su becomes a living, breathing person in the reader's mind. And that is a strong measure of success. Are there one or two coincidences that stretch reality a touch? Yes, but the overwhelming majority of the novel remains human through and through. Regardless whether you are interested in what is happening in North Korea or D&D, Theroux makes Jun-su's story engaging, and for those who want, affecting. I don't know how much buzz this novel will get given it was released toward the end of 2022, not to mention there are thousands of new books released each year, but if you're looking for something truly good to read, this is it.