About the book
(Synopsis)
From the First District, where high government officials and people of power reside, to the Ninth District, which was abandoned because of the “December Riots” 60 years earlier, the society depicted in the novel is strictly divided and as such seems timeless, unclear whether it is located in the past or in the future despite the analogue technology that is perhaps not so advanced as our own.
The main characters are as follows: Runner Young, originally from the Ninth District but surreptitiously settled in the First District after the December Riots; his son Niesse Young, Vice-Minister of Education and Chairman of the Prime School Committee, who has helped to hold the memorial service for his school friend Jay for 30 years; Niesse’s son Darwin Young, a good student at Prime School, the best boarding school in the First District; Leo Marshall, an outsider in Prime School; and Rumi Hunter, a student of the Primera Girls’ School, who tries to learn the whole story of her uncle Jay’s death. Around the main character Darwin, now sixteen, develops a story that has the plot of a mystery.
The novel seems to be a mystery focused on the process of Rumi’s search for the truth of her uncle Jay’s death. Jay was murdered at the age of sixteen by a Hoodie, a rioter in the December Riots. She is suspicious about the circumstances of the death. Her father first told her that he heard some noises in his brother’s room in the early morning when he was murdered, but he later reverses his statement. One thing missing from Jay’s room was a photo that he got from his father, a photo documenting a scene of December Riots. Thinking the photo to be a key, Rumi continues her search. Darwin, who likes Rumi, joins the search, and they go to the Ninth District for the first time in their lives. The revolt 60 years earlier started with people of low class in the Ninth District and was joined by people up to the Fourth District, but it failed. The incident was documented as “December Riots” by historians, and the policy since then was to isolate the Ninth District, and the people living there were left behind like wild animals subject to natural selection in a struggle for survival.
Rumi’s search leads to the conjecture that the murderer of her uncle Jay was not a rioter from the Ninth District but someone with power from the First District. By accident, she hears uncle Jay’s voice from a cassette that he recorded 30 years earlier while listening to music. In searching for other cassettes that might record the voice of culprit, she learns that Buzz Marshall, Leo’s father, a famous documentary film producer and writer, might have the cassettes. Buzz was also a friend of Jay and Niesse. She learns from Buzz Marshall more about the photo. On the photo was a boy with a specific facial mark, and Jay had seen that mark on the face of an adult in the First District and would say that he was going to exterminate the man. Leo intended to find the cassette at his grandfather’s house, but Rumi cannot know whether he found the cassette or not because he went to the Ninth District and came back dead. He is thought to have been murdered by a Hoodie in the Ninth District.
Who killed Leo, and who killed Jay? Readers can slowly assemble the evidence and gradually figure out who the murderers are, namely, Niesse Young and his son, Darwin Young. Why did they kill their friends? The novel, a kind of mystery, thematizes a larger issue, namely the good and evil that coexist in a human being.
Darwin Young’s development from a good, innocent boy into a hardened boy capable of committing the evil of murder for the sake of his father, who in turn had done the same earlier for his father, shows how human beings evolve in unknown direction. The novel shows a process of tracing the “missing link” in Darwin Young’s evolution, and is simultaneously a report on the essence of the human being, a story that still applies to us living today. With great imagination, elaborate plot, and complex characters, the novel explores the human condition in depth. A quick read but with long lingering images, this novel is a must not only for young adults but also for anyone.
About the author
Bak Ji-ri made her literary debut at twenty-five in 2010, when she received the Sakyejul Literary Award with her story Merge, a juvenile literature novel. She published a short story “Seventeen, Seventeen” and several novels such as Manhole (2012), Yang Chun-dan’s Report of a University Visit (2014), and Darwin Young’s Origin of Evil (2016), her last novel. After her unexpected death by suicide in 2016, About MAN Who Acted Unpredictably at the Third Job Interview, a novel in the form of a play, was published in 2018. Her unpublished manuscripts are going to be published later this year.
Her last novel Darwin Young’s Origin of Evil, which received the Red Award by the Labor Party and one of the Korean Book Awards by Hankook Daily in 2016, has been made into a music theater by Seoul Art and is going to be performed on the stage of Seoul Arts Center from October 2-7, 2018.
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