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What Mr. Shin conceals from the congregation is that he has himself suffered a traumatic loss of faith. His harrowing dilemma is that of a man who understands the need for religion but cannot accept God. His disillusioned vision of Christ is of a "divinely mad young man, nailed to a cross, jeered at and hated, riddled by bloody Roman spears, helpless in the face of his enemies—the pitiful body of the alleged son of God, gasping, panting, sweating, bleeding, without a miracle to save him." And yet, torn by inner doubt as he is, when the Chinese Communists enter the war and the U.N. forces are forced to retreat to the south, Mr. Shin elects to remain with his congregation in Pyongyang. "We will give them their Christ and their Judas," Mr. Shin explains. For he has come to believe that what man needs is not the chill wind of reason, as the young narrator insists, but the healing balm of belief.
Aide-de-Camp. Novelist Kim's father was a North Korean landowner who was jailed by the Communists in 1945 for his defiant political activity. Kim fled to South Korea, was a student at Seoul University when the North Koreans invaded. He served during the war as aide-de-camp to General Arthur G. Trudeau; at war's end Trudeau helped him get to the U.S. and to Middlebury College. There Kim decided he wanted to be a novelist.
He wrote to Poet Paul Engle at the State University of Iowa, who wangled a fellowship for him in the university's creative-writing program. Kim completed most of The Martyred there.
Now a teacher at California's Long Beach State College, he learned to write novels and to write English at the same time. He is far better at both than most U.S. practitioners can ever expect to be.