A rusting, bullet-riddled locomotive in the demilitarised zone that slices through the Korean peninsula gives this marvellous epic novel its enigmatic title. Captured during the Korean war of the early 1950s, the immobilised train pointing North has become a famous symbol of the frustrated yearning for reunification, a “commemorative fossil of the age of division”. The train is an underlying motif within Hwang Sok-yong’s mature masterpiece, a worker’s-eye view of the 20th-century history surrounding Korea’s partition, which draws deeply on his personal experience of labour and pro-democracy movements and his five-year stint in prison for breaching South Korean security laws by visiting the North in 1989.
Originally published in Korean in 2020, Mater 2-10 opens in the 21st century with a laid-off factory worker, Yi Jino, staging a vertiginous “sit-in” on the catwalk round an industrial chimney. In a mountaineering tent overlooking railway tracks, his sky-high protest stretches beyond a year, while far below workers prostrate themselves in solidarity.
