Impossible Fairy Tale

"Han Yujoo is a young writer from South Korea, and she’s part of this new generation of young Korean writers, following on from Han Kang. We know Han Kang has found international recognition [Han Kang’s novel The Vegetarian , translated by Deborah Smith, won the Man Booker Prize for International Fiction in 2016], but Yujoo is part of the next wave of writers really challenging the literary form. Here you have a book, as you said, where we’re seeing the world not just through the eyes of one child but through the eyes of two children. There’s a school full of them, in fact, but we focus on the very wealthy Mia, and the Child, who is the opposite of Mia. Child is abused at home, and she’s deeply troubled. The novel has this really eerie tone, and it sort of reminded me of stories that I’ve read and loved in the past, which have children as the major menace of the book. Precisely, or more recently Carrie by Stephen King. The Child has all of those elements of the haunting within, and it’s a story about her and about the schoolroom. At lot of it takes place at school, with the child being fairly invisible in it. She has signs of abuse. She has signs of neglect all over her, the bruises and whatnot, and nobody notices, because she’s just a nobody. She’s unfairly invisible. And Mia is this child who’s the opposite of that – you know, she gets everything she wants, she’s pretty, she’s popular. And these two girls end up in a kind of friendship that leads to something really melodramatic, and it’s a turning point, and it’s horrifying, and it’s murderous. Then, the novel goes off in another direction, and it’s about the writing of these characters. It gets quite metafictive. It’s a device that ordinarily I might roll my eyes at, and think, ‘Oh God. This is immature,’ or ‘I hate being played with. I want to go back to these two girls, and I want to go back to the drama of the classroom.’ But I didn’t feel that here, because the two girls seep into the metafictive genre and they rear up in it as they are being created by the writer. It’s real cleverness on Han Yujoo’s part. That I don’t find her cleverness really contrived and mannered is a testament to her managing to stay just on the right side of experimentalism. “She toys with reality, crafting scenes that might be real, but could be fantasy or imagined, too – there’s a surreal, hallucinatory quality to it” She toys with reality, crafting scenes that might be real, but could be fantasy or imagined, too, so it’s a little bit like Han Kang’s The Vegetarian in that sense – there’s a surreal, hallucinatory quality to it. She does that so well. She sucks you into an interrogation of reality, of how much reality is actually out there and how much of it is in our heads. Her writing is daring. She tells a story – there’s a very strong horror story there, but there’s also real innovation in writing, real innovation in form, and a lot of thought behind it. It’s really dazzling how complicated a book it is, and I’m stunned that somebody so young can write a book with so many layers to it."