“In fiction, spoiler alerts exist to protect the reader experience, premised on the idea that knowing a story’s outcome will reduce momentum and suspense,” Yale history professor Beverly Gage writes in a recent New Yorker review of a book on Franklin D. Roosevelt. “In historical writing, it’s just the opposite. Works of history gain energy from the fact that readers know where the narrative is going, especially when it’s going nowhere good.”
Well, here’s a spoiler alert: KOREAN MESSIAH doesn’t have a happy ending (unless you’re a member of the Kim dynasty).
In the early stages of the book research, I often wondered if I would be able to sustain readers’ interest across all these pages—especially when we all know that where this story is ultimately heading is, as Gage writes, “nowhere good.”
But at some point in the process, the wisdom of Gage’s point became more apparent to me. The fact that the reader knows where this story is going isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. Like telling the story of the Titanic (spoiler alert: it hits an iceberg and sinks on the same day that Kim Il Sung is born, April 15, 1912), knowing how it all ends actually propels the narrative forward, as Pyongyang goes from the Sodom of Korea to the “Jerusalem of the East” to the holy capital of the Kim dynasty.
It’s funny that I’m writing today about this sense of foreboding—the question of how something so right could turn out to be so wrong—because my mind is very much on beginnings again.
Tomorrow, I start round two of my U.S.-Canada book tour in Cincinnati, not far from where my book itself begins—just down the Ohio River in Madison, Indiana, the hometown of Samuel A. Moffett. Over the next few days, I’ll be speaking at Hanover College, where Moffett decided to become a missionary, and at Madison Presbyterian Church, where he bade his friends and family farewell in December 1889 before setting sail for Korea.
Over the next week, my dad and I will be driving the state of Indiana, from Madison in the south to South Bend in the north, before ending up in Chicago (after making a one-night-only detour to New York City). Beyond that lies California and more—for details, see my website.
See you on the road, and pray I don’t hit an iceberg.
P.S. KOREAN MESSIAH is one of the three finalists for the Cundill History Prize! Which means I’m now going to make a second detour out east, this time to Montreal for the awards ceremony on October 22-23. I’d say “vote for me,” but I’m not sure it’s that kind of thing.
P.P.S. I’m also attaching a few photos here shared by friends who have spotted the book out in the wild—at the New York Public Library, in San Francisco, Berlin, and elsewhere. Thanks for sharing!