Book review: A glimpse behind the last Iron Curtain - Telegraph

Book review: A glimpse behind the last Iron Curtain - Telegraph

Book review: A glimpse behind the last Iron Curtain

Robert Willoughby reviews Comrades and Strangers: Behind the Closed Doors of 
North Korea by Michael Harrold.



12:01AM GMT 13 Nov 2004



Western reporters visiting North Korea invariably rave about the brainwashing going on there. Few write up their fleeting visits without nailing the words "para-noid", "starving" and "Stalinist" around tales of escaping their guides but failing to persuade locals to spill their stories of oppression.


One journalist, who had sat down on a park bench in the capital, Pyongyang, to chat to a local girl, reported how shocked he was to see her run off, apparently terrified of being seen talking to a foreigner.


But what, asks Michael Harrold, would a girl do in the West if she were approached in a deserted place by an elderly foreigner who started blathering in a strange language? It's one of many subtle points that Harrold, now a journalist and editor in Warsaw, makes in this measured book.


He had just graduated in English at Leeds when he saw an advertisement in the university for a job in North Korea, editing the flowery speeches of "the Great Leader", Kim Il Sung. "I had promised myself a year or two of adventure before settling down," he writes, "and living in the world's most isolated country more than fitted the bill."


In the event, he stayed for seven years, and witnessed an extraordinary state undergoing extraordinary times. When the Berlin Wall fell and the North was left isolated by its Communist allies' dash to capitalism, Harrold's North Korean friends talked not of fear but of maudlin tragedy that their country's division, foisted on Korea by the superpowers in 1945, was now unique. He watched the regime's glacially slow but politically seismic steps towards capitalism.

Officially, direct party control of production and distribution was not loosened until 2002, but free markets on the farms had begun in the 1980s, only to serve as a prelude to a terrifyingly silent slip towards famine. When food began to run short in the capital as well as in the countryside, Harrold and his foreign colleagues were kept well fed, hoardings on restaurant windows hiding them from the hungry locals.

Pyongyang's citizens, he reports, took part with cheerful humour in frequent air-raid drills (organised against the apparently frequent threat of attack by US forces), singing in the deep Metro stations and shouting "American bastards!" for almost comic effect. They became fearfully quiet, however, at an abrupt swing in relations with the United States - from promising talks with the administration of George Bush senior to nuclear brinksmanship with Clinton.

The most poignant part of Harrold's story is an episodic account of his love for a local girl, a love slyly wrecked by the disapproving authorities. He recounts what, by Western standards, was a courtship of Victorian propriety but which inflamed officials.

The relationship works as a metaphor for how a "warm, generous and long-suffering people" are prevented from showing their real selves by suspicious minds above and around them. North Koreans are too often portrayed as hapless droids; Harrold peels back the last Iron Curtain to reveal their humanity.


Comrades and Strangers: Behind the Closed Doors of North Korea By Michael Harrold (Wiley, £14.99)
Robert Willoughby is author of the Bradt Guide to North Korea.