The Innocent by Richard E. Kim

First published: 1968

Type of plot: War

Time of work: 1953

Locale: South Korea

Principal Characters:

• Major Lee, a young officer in the South Korean army, a brilliant military strategist philosophically opposed to any but the most unavoidable violence
• Colonel Min, a revolutionary of great integrity and courage who grimly accepts responsibility for bloodshed as the price demanded by justice
• Colonel McKay, an American CIA officer who keeps largely in the background but abets Colonel Min’s coup efforts
• General Mah, head of Armed Forces Intelligence, the Presidential Brigade, and the Metropolitan Police of Seoul

The Novel

The Innocent takes its title from the almost paradoxical reluctance to take human life of Major Lee, an army officer who is masterminding the overthrow of his own government. Major Lee’s respect for law, order, and human life pits him in an allegorical struggle with Colonel Min, the military leader of the coup to which the novel builds up. The conflict between the two officers dominates the story, which is narrated by Lee himself. Lee’s idealism is understandable for someone so obviously dedicated to his country, but his innocence often appears to be sheer naïveté in a military genius. Colonel Min is Lee’s antagonist, but Min is not a bad man; he is, in fact, an exceptionally good one, although he is at times given to an unconvincing Byronic brooding over the metaphysical conundrums of guilt, fate, and necessity.

Given these narrative weaknesses, The Innocent reads best, perhaps, as a version of the medieval psychomachia, a battle of allegorical abstractions. Major Lee thus becomes Colonel Min’s conscience, and the real conflict becomes the painful tug of opposed impulses in the psyche of a good man of whom history makes difficult demands for action. At crucial moments, Min acts to preserve Lee’s innocence by doing the dirty work himself—even sending Lee to Japan under virtual house arrest while the coup is being fought—and he seems to admire Lee’s pure-mindedness, even though he finds it ineffectual.

As for the long, drawn-out buildup to the coup itself (which finally comes to pass three-fourths of the way through this almost four-hundred-page work), it consists not so much of action scenes as of long conversations in which the major characters, who are not always sharply differentiated, explain to one another various events from the past or analyze the motives of their fellow officers. Despite the potential for boredom in this narrative procedure, the intricacy of the intrigues actually holds it all together. The coup itself is never described at first hand but is summarized in a lengthy news dispatch that effectively catches the tone and style of such reports.

The Innocent is told in retrospect by Major Lee, and it opens in 1953, shortly after the end of the Korean War, with a dialogue between Major Lee and Reverend Koh, an army chaplain and an old friend of Lee’s from the recent war. Lee is about to leave for an officers’ course at Fort Benning, Georgia, and Reverend Koh has come to bid him a good voyage and ask him why, with a good university teaching career ahead of him, Major Lee has chosen to stay in the army. The scene establishes Lee’s patriotism and idealism—ironically revealing the chaplain to be the more cynical of the two—and sets the tone for Lee’s behavior throughout the novel.

Lee’s reminiscences then reveal that several years have passed, during which he has completed his tour at Fort Benning, studied at the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas, and served as a military attaché in Southeast Asia and Europe. With this exposition out of the way, the novel proper opens in chapter 2 on August 18 of an unidentified year, “four days before the coup.” Major Lee has just been ordered home from Turkey and assigned to the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Seoul, where he has apparently just planned the impending coup.

The coup has been hatched among a small group of general officers led by Lieutenant General Hyun. A command group of nine officers carries out the actual planning and execution under Colonel Min, special assistant to General Hyun. Before the coup can actually take place, various political problems with renegade general officers must be overcome. The jockeying for position with these corrupt dissidents leads to an extended and truly engrossing scene: a night-time showdown between a large force led by Colonel Min (abetted by Colonel McKay, the Central Intelligence Agency operative) and the treacherous Major General Mah, head of Armed Forces Intelligence, who wants to cut a deal to save himself from a post-coup court-martial and probable execution.

The dramatic—and well-told—confrontation with General Mah occurs halfway through the novel. With Mah out of the way, Min senses that the way is clear for the coup, and he orders Major Lee back to Japan, under supervision by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Min’s motive is apparently to remove Lee from the scene of bloodshed and preserve by force the major’s idealism and innocence. The coup, although bloody, succeeds except for the machinations of the vicious General Ham, who takes a group of hostages.

Ham thinks he has the CIA’s support, and, indeed, Colonel McKay does not want to see a civil war break out. He brings Lee back to Seoul to negotiate peacefully. Yet McKay also wants Colonel Min to give him, for intelligence purposes, two officers who have turned out to be Communist infiltrators from North Korea, and so McKay and Min agree on a swap: Min can have Ham if McKay can have the two officers. The hostages are murdered by rebels in Ham’s group, however, leaving Ham with no trump card, and he dies when his plane is shelled as he tries to leave the scene of a parley with Min.

The coup is complete, then, but in a bloody finale, Min is assassinated in his automobile, and the peacemaker Lee kills the last assassin with a grenade. These events spell the end of Major Lee’s idealism. The novel ends as it began: with Lee, now a civilian, engaged in an earnest farewell dialogue with Chaplain Koh before leaving his country for what may be forever.

The Characters

Only two characters in The Innocent demand any consideration: the narrator, Major Lee, and Colonel Min. Lee is by temperament and training more of an academic than a military officer, but love of his country impels him to take up a military career after the Korean War ends. Lee met Colonel Min during their teaching days together at a university in Seoul. After the war, a year before the coup, both Lee and Min were in Paris, where Min conceived of the plans for the coup in a sidewalk café. Their relationship thus has a long history.

The idealist Lee is haunted by a story about Min that he is told by a young officer from Min’s village. Min is rumored to have shot and killed a North Korean officer in cold blood in the time immediately following World War II. The true story turns out to have been that Min had been in Manchuria with Korean units fighting with Communist Chinese forces, and that these Korean forces had become the vital cadre of the new North Korean army. Min, however, simply left his unit and went home, only to have a North Korean major come and take him under arrest to a nearby Russian garrison. The North Korean major was an intensely patriotic Communist who wanted Min to come back and work with the Korean Communists.

What happened at the Russian garrison became the basis for the rumor of Min’s brutality. In the presence of the Russian commander, a major, and a Russian lieutenant, the North Korean major had given Min a cruel lashing with a whip. The North Korean major, already in a frenzy, became infuriated by the Russian officers’ laughter at the abuse of Min and had suddenly grabbed the Russian major by the neck and strangled him. Min, meanwhile, had whipped and shot the Russian lieutenant. Min and the North Korean had then driven away to Min’s village, and Min left the major in the jeep while he roused friends. When Min returned to the jeep, however, he found the major apparently dead from his own pistol.

Later, after the coup, Colonel McKay explains to Lee that the North Korean major did not die from his wound after all but was taken to a Russian hospital to recover. The Russians naturally thought that the two dead Russians and the wounded North Korean were Min’s doing, and Min thus gained his reputation as a ruthless killer. Major Lee learns all this about his friend with great relief.

Critical Context

In The Innocent, Richard E. Kim writes of a world he knows well. He was born in Hamhung, Korea, in 1932, and during the Korean War he served as liaison officer to the U.S. Army and as an aide-de-camp in the Korean military. After the war, he took graduate degrees from Middlebury College, the State University of Iowa, and Harvard University.

Kim’s first novel was The Martyred (1964), a philosophical speculation on goodness and truth set in Seoul shortly after the North Korean invasion. The martyrs of the title are twelve Christian missionaries shot to death in Pyongyang by Communists. Two other missionaries are spared, however, and their good fortune becomes the subject of speculation and the basis of a probing examination of moral and spiritual issues that foreshadows the theme of The Innocent.

In Lost Names (1970), Kim re-creates, in the words of his subtitle, “Scenes from a Korean Boyhood.” These seven scenes are set during World War II in a Korea that is occupied by the Japanese, and the “lost names” are names that Koreans have to give up and replace with officially registered Japanese names. The Kims’ new name becomes Iwamoto, or “rock foundation.” These seven essays recover movingly a period and place little thought of by most Westerners and do much to illuminate the sensibility behind Kim’s two philosophical novels.

Bibliography

Clark, Colin. Review of The Innocent, by Richard E. Kim. Library Journal 93 (October 1, 1968): 3578. Clark is critical of the novel’s lack of action, background, and development. He describes the book’s conversations as “stilted” and the characters as “a faceless pack of colonels and generals.”

Gropman, Donald. Review of The Innocent, by Richard E. Kim. The Christian Science Monitor, October 31, 1968, p. 13. Judges Colonel Min to be more believable than Major Lee in a novel that fails to convince the reader that its characters could be real people.

Kim, Richard. Lost Names: Scenes from a Korean Boyhood. New York: Praeger, 1970. Recalling that the Japanese invaders forced Koreans to abandon their own names when the Japanese occupied the country from 1932 to 1945, Kim paints seven vivid scenes from his boyhood. Although this book does not deal with Kim’s fiction, it does provide insight into his background and the reasons behind the drawing of certain themes.

Nichols, Christopher. “The Tough and the Tender.” National Review 21 (February 25, 1969): 183-184. The longest and most flattering review of “Mr. Kim’s vivid, timely and courageous rendering of his native land’s ordeals.” Nicholas responds pugnaciously to a negative review in The New York Times, lauding the “basic Christian theme” that animates The Innocent as well as its “secular insights.”

O’Brien, R. E. Review of The Innocent, by Richard E. Kim. Best Sellers 28 (October 15, 1968): 288. Praises everything about the novel: its insights and suspense, its artistically handled theme, and its excellent dialogue.

Simpson, H. A. Review of The Innocent, by Richard E. Kim. Saturday Review 51 (November 23, 1968): 66. Complains about the long stretches of dialogue that do not advance the plot, but judges The Innocent a “worthy successor” to The Martyred, if not ultimately as good as the earlier novel.