A Punch Delivered Under Water peter Gardner
GARDNER, PETER
A Punch Delivered Under Water THE INNOCENT By Richard Kim Houghton Mifflin. 384 pp. $6.95. Reviewed by PETER GARDNER The title and theme recall Camus, the tortured tone of the two protagonists...
...As a matter of fact, Colonel Min is the only character in the book who might permit us to suspend a little of our disbelief...
...Unfortunately in trying to write a moral drama he has given the maximum exposure to his greatest weakness, his ideas, which in this novel at least consist of the most vapid generalities...
...Most of the time he is "helpless," "speechless" or "close to tears...
...the action concerns the complicated (and fatuous) doings of a group of dissident Army officers determined to overthrow a corrupt civilian government in the interests of the "poor, suffering people...
...He finds it extremely hard to see people except in sentimental categories of extreme evil or extreme good—to him they tend to be either beasts or saints...
...Perhaps the less said about the "brilliant" Major Lee, with his "ideals based on humanistic philosophy," the better...
...they lay- traps, they fall into traps, and they sometimes shoot it out...
...But Kim won't have it...
...We learn through lengthy flashbacks that he has been involved in various military exploits, and are invited to darkly surmise that he has allowed expedience to conquer decency...
...As the book goes on (and on and on) it turns out that only some of the generals are against the government, while others are for it and yet others are merely for themselves...
...Far from helping in the coup, which it is impossible to suppose he planned, his sole function is to stand at Colonel Min's elbow and cry "Beast...
...Background and complicating circumstance (except in the vaguest personal terms) are nowhere...
...his longing for a truly democratic society...
...Good and pure do not necessarily and automatically come from good and pure...
...Kim addresses himself to these questions with ponderous reiteration and ultimately fails to resolve them...
...nor does Kim consider what the officers are going to do with their power once they have it, or how the government's police and secret agents allowed so much noisy plotting to go unchecked...
...But any comparison between the achieved artistic worlds of Camus and Conrad and the bumbling chaos of The Innocent would be neither useful nor a service to the author...
...his desire to express these feelings in a significant work of fiction—all of this is palpable...
...Unhappily, though, the "insides" of Min and Lee are little more interesting than the "out-sides" of the generals: We only hear more about them...
...It cannot be said to fall apart at any particular point because at no point does it cohere...
...As one reads one cannot help wishing Kim had been a little cynical: Had he concentrated on action and characterization and left significance to take care of itself, he might have conveyed some message...
...Kim's sincerity and artistic intentions cannot be doubted...
...the one thing they fail to do is come alive...
...They all speak the same linguistic idiom or non-idiom (a sort of cross between Kim's idea of army tough-talk and schoolboy slang), and nothing really distinguishes them but their names and whether they happen to be for the coup (good guys) or against the coup (bad guys...
...Colonel Min is cast in the role of tragic hero ("In the dark of night I howl at the sky with all my sorrows...
...It would have been helpful, too, if someone had Kim reminded that verbosity is not intensity: "And then—in one blinding, bleeding, aching moment, it flashed across my seething, boiling, burning mind that...
...The Innocent thus takes place in a sort of social, political and even geographical no man's land...
...whenever Colonel Min is forced out of dire necessity to cry "Fire...
...The sensitive minds in the case belong to Colonel Min, the executive leader of the coup, and Major Lee, its master-planner (as well the narrator of the novel...
...In the penultimate line Major Lee tells us, "But—all this, too, is by the way...
...Reviewed by PETER GARDNER The title and theme recall Camus, the tortured tone of the two protagonists smacks faintly of Conrad's Lord Jim...
...Finally, the dialogue carries the weight of a punch delivered under water...
...his rage in the face of cruelty, injustice and corruption...
...Colonel Min, who promises to develop into a fairly convincing beast/saint, or human being, gradually reveals himself to be a man of the most fastidious moral scrupulousness with nothing of the beast about him—which of course leaves him little to howl at the sky about...
...If one succumbs to the temptation, does one become as evil as that which one would destroy...
...None of it rises above that level...
...his resentment at American "condescension...
...At the end he is very close to tears indeed: Colonel Min has been slain in the moment of triumph, and the major, having learned too late that this "mad, maddening world" needs people like Min, is left to offer up a "silent dirge" for the dead—and with a bad case of "nostalgia" for his lost innocence...
...Yet the sad fact is that The Innocent is poorly written, dull and unconvincing...
...His passionate identification with the Korean people...
...A strange reward for the reader's pains...
...Is one justified in employing evil means to encompass virtuous ends...
...Kim has not so much set the stage for the moral drama in which he is chiefly interested, as simply cleared it of everything that could make it real...
...But so wearisome are these generals, so puppet-like, so devoid of specific character or motivation, that the reader very soon ceases to bother about who is on the side of whom or who will succeed in killing whom, although he thereby deprives himself of virtually the only elements of suspense and surprise the book supplies The generals, plot, argue, shout and fume...
...We learn nothing of the government except that it is corrupt, nothing of the people except that they are poor and suffering...
...Since they carry the burden of Kim's high moral theme (from the standpoints of experience and innocence, respectively) he endows each of them with an "inside...
...The novel is supposed to be about the dilemma of ends and means that war poses to the sensitive mind...
...The Innocent is set in Korea at about the time of the fall of Syng-man Rhee...
...Never was a hero less brilliant or more mawkish...
...Perhaps if Kim had written in his native Korean and found himself a good editor/translator we might have been spared such things as "bloodsucking cunning of a leech" or "I cried out in whispers" or "clipped, booming voice," not to mention such nonsense as "[They were] pretending to know enough about the other and at the same time pretending to know nothing...
Vol. 51 • December 1968 • No. 24
