The interest in North Korea is unsurprising in an era of rising totalitarian states and growing threats to basic freedoms in democratic countries. The latest addition to the catalogue of books about this little understood place is Marcel Theroux’s The Sorcerer of Pyongyang, which sets out to narrate the story of a nation, beginning in the 1990s, through the life of its main character, Cho Jun-su.
Jun-su isn’t one of North Korea’s elite; he has the typical problems of a high school student anywhere, in addition to the horrors of widespread famine around him and endless political requirements, such as the mandatory weekly self-criticism sessions that require public confessions of wrongdoings from all citizens. His life is transformed one day, however, when he accidentally encounters a Dungeons and Dragons rulebook, The Dungeon Masters Guide, left behind by a foreign hotel guest and later picked up by Jun-su’s father, one of the hotel’s kitchen staff.
