Jinwoo Park’s the Oxford Soju Club is a high-body-count, tragic spy-thriller and an exploration of the immigrant experience. The novel is set in Oxford during a purge of the North Korean intelligence service that followed the death of Kim Jong-Il. North Korean, American, and South Korean spys play a game of cat and mouse centered around the only Korean restaurant in town, and the tale is told through multiple points of view.
Each Korean character has a unique connection to their heritage and degree of comfort in their identity, largely explored through ruminations on the past, and many of the character are young with unprocessed family of origin issues. Some times these characters feel academic, descriptions of a type, more than real people.
As a remote descendant of immigrants, I’ve dodged this particular bullet. But having lived in two post-colonial, immigrant nations, I’ve witnessed first generation and second generation friends and acquaintances struggle with these very issues. And this novel very elegantly lays out the landscape of the immigrant experience.
The author also clearly lays out the rather complex plot, but the prose felt remote, despite being written in the present tense, partly because of the lengthily ruminations into the past, but also due to a deficit of sensory detail. The rain in Oxford should smell of ocean fog and make the pavement or cobblestones slick. Blood should be tacky between the fingers and smell like iron. And what about the food? It’s Korean and delicious, but I would have appreciated more specifics – the heady aroma of meat scented with pepper and coriander, tongues going numb or tingling, steam wafting from the bowl like a garlic and sesame oil scented genie. But now I am making myself hungry.
One other complaint, the book includes lengthy front matter, with a discussion by the author describing the meaning and purpose of the novel. I prefer to figure out what a book is about as I read, so I would highly prefer to find this sort of material in the back matter. And a pox on front matter beyond a list of preferably named chapters. Front matter, (especially those long scholarly discussions found in older novels) is an impediment to engaging with the story and shrinks the sample size, so why not move it all to the end of the book?
Anyway, I was left with the impression that this novel is a book of the heart, the novel that this author must write to process an core life experience, and writing this novel will free him to express many other aspects of the human experience.
I’ve been looking forward to this novel ever since I encountered the author on TikTok. A highly intelligent,engaging, and thoughtful Canadian of Korean descent, he explores the immigrant experience and discussed social, historical, and political aspects of the Korean experience. Sadly, I felt compelled to bail from TikTok after it was “rescued” by a certain political figure, and I miss this creators content. Given the high quality of this first novel, I look forward to more from this author.