Long Road Home: Testimony of a North Korean Camp Survivor
By Kim Yong with Kim Suk-young
Columbia University Press £17, 184 pages
FT Bookshop price: £14

Page 142 of Long Road Home comes as a shock. Kim Yong, escaping from the horrors of North Korea’s gulags in 1999, is suddenly guided across the Gobi desert by a pillar of fire, the numinous force that led Moses out of Egypt.

It is not uncommon for South Korean missionaries to meet defectors as soon as they flee into China, and for memoirs by penal camp survivors to end with the authors turning to Christianity. But Kim’s conversion is by far the most arresting, not least because to understand this autobiography we need to fathom the mind-warping North Korean state cult that shaped Kim in the first place. When that cult betrays him, he needs to fill the void.

Kim’s upbringing in a state orphanage ensured he became devoted to the cult of Kim Il-sung, the nation’s founder. In this quasireligion, North Korea’s rulers govern by the “mandate of heaven”, which shows its approval with comets and rainbows. Ironically, celestial signs are perhaps less alien to Kim Yong than to many brought up in the Christian tradition.

In Long Road Home, Kim admits that as a youth he was not academic – he preferred martial arts and beating people up. This qualifies him perfectly for military rank and he ends up running one of the army’s export rackets to earn the regime’s hard currency, setting up key clients with prostitutes. Kim gives us a marvellously unsympathetic portrait of a brainwashed apparatchik.

His privileged world crumbles in 1993, however, when it is discovered that his father, who he never knew, collaborated with the Americans in the Korean War. Our narrator is flung into a prison camp and endures six years of hell.

He describes a nightmarish existence: many inmates starve to death; they work in deep coal seams, see no sunlight and survive on only four hours’ sleep. Arbitrary execution is common and some prisoners turn to cannibalism, he writes – at one point his fellow prisoners hack off the leg of a convict killed in a shaft collapse. Inmates even perform abortions to eat foetuses, he claims.

Kim, though indoctrinated from birth, is ultimately disgusted by the cult that betrayed his devotion. After his escape, however, he initially resists the missionaries he meets – he still harbours a communist suspicion of Christianity. He is also resentful of South Koreans who insist that the North started the war.

In the book’s best-observed passage, Kim plays ping-pong with South Korean spies when being debriefed in Seoul. The games degenerate into open hostility – he cannot rid himself of his pre-programmed contempt for South Korea’s “rebels”.

The publishers of this book want Kim to be compared with Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who disavowed socialism in the camps and explored his Orthodox faith more deeply. The parallels are limited, however. Kim, who has become a pastor in Los Angeles, is not even pretending to be a writer – his tales are recounted by his interviewer, Kim Suk-young. It would be unfair to expect a Solzhenitsyn novel, full of dark humour and philosophical reflection. Kim is just not that sort of guide.

What we see instead is why North Korea is unlikely ever to produce a Solzhenitsyn. Kim is shocked when he meets Soviets who can openly guffaw about Yuri Andropov. North Korea also lacks Russia’s profound literary heritage. Solzhenitsyn had Tolstoy to draw on; Kim Yong had Kim Il-sung.

We should not be reading such memoirs for encouragement that North Koreans are “just like us”. These are cautionary tales about damaged minds. Some 24 million people are ensnared by a vicious state cult that has lasted 60 years. When that unravels, filling the gap will be painful.

Christian Oliver is the FT’s Seoul correspondent