Mater 2-10 by Hwang Sok-yong: A novel of epic ambition about life in Korea before and after partition

Korean writer Hwang Sok-yong, now aged 80, has been publishing novels for more than 50 years. As an activist who has spent long periods in exile or prison, his writing and political perspectives are inseparable.

Mater 2-10 opens with the story of Jino, a worker staging a protest at the top of a factory chimney. His tent, high on a wooden catwalk, is as precarious as his economic position. The story casts back through several generations of Jino’s family to the turn of the 20th century and the brutal Japanese occupation of Korea, enabled by Korean collaborators who tortured and murdered activists with impunity. A core thread contrasts the life of Jino’s grandfather, an apolitical train engineer, with that of his grandfather’s brother, a worker activist who is perpetually under police scrutiny. There is a grim continuity to the generations, as the attritional conflict between occupying authorities and worker dissidents plays out through different lives but with consistently disheartening results. In all this, the political loyalties of the writer are abundantly obvious: the workers are unimpeachably selfless, the authorities cruel and corrupt.

[ At Dusk by Hwang Sok-yong review: A life subtly corrupted ]

The book is carefully constructed for the first two-thirds – up to the partition of Korea in 1948 – but the treatment of later generations is somewhat rushed. There is a missing narrative bridge between Jino and the past due to the cursory treatment of his father’s story. This also results in a post-partition hole in the novel, with unanswered questions about where the experience of North Korea fits into a narrative about worker revolutionaries (though the writer has written about that elsewhere).

This book has “major work by major writer’ written all over it, and it is certainly a novel of epic ambition and mostly convincing delivery. It is important not least because of its long perspective in depicting the plight of those marginalised by a succession of colonial influences: Japan, the US and global capitalism. In that spirit, the translation by Sora Kim-Russell and Youngjae Josephine Bae makes sensitive and intelligent choices to “decolonise the translation”, as they explain in their translators’ note.

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Mater 2-10, like Hwang Sok-yong’s previously translated novels, Familiar Things and the Booker-longlisted At Dusk, shows a writer with panoramic range on societal issues, who still retains a compassionate touch with human stories at a more intimate level.