The Plotters by Un-Su Kim (4th Estate)

When his job gets him down, Reseng knows it’s time for Beer Week. He orders ten boxes of beer, clears out his refrigerator,  and replaces the food with beer cans. He takes peanuts and dried anchovies out of his freezer for nourishment and opens his first beer. By the time he crushes the last can, he’s ready to get back to work.

Found in a garbage can when he was a baby, Reseng is adopted when he turns four by a man called Old Raccoon and grows up in a place called the Doghouse Library. Surrounded by books, he teaches himself to read, a skill that will do nothing to enhance the career path Old Raccoon has waiting for him. Reseng is fated to become an assassin, one of many who are directed by plotters and owned by contractors. Reseng is owned by Old Raccoon.

After his first kill, Reseng asks “Am I going to end up killing more and more people?” “No,” Old Raccoon tells him, “You’ll kill fewer and fewer. But you’ll make more and more money.”

And as Reseng’s targets become increasingly valuable, the money increases too. He’s good at his job. But the morning that he finds a small ceramic bomb in his toilet, a delicate but deadly item, sends him off into Beer Week. 

In Reseng’s line of work, a man doesn’t have friends; he has associates and one of his associates is a tracker. Jeongan is a man who cultivates the art of being so ordinary that nobody will ever notice him or remember him. He can find anyone and he finds the person who put the bomb in Reseng’s toilet. 

Mito works in a convenience store, a puzzling occupation considering that she studied medicine and is fully qualified to be a doctor. Too small to be an assassin, too young to be a plotter, she is, Jeongan says, “one disturbingly complex woman,” who is obsessed with Reseng. But why?

The Plotters is no ordinary thriller. Each one of its characters is unique and none of them are who they seem. The cross-eyed librarian who works for Old Raccoon; the “grumbling orangutan-size man” who “looked like Winnie the Pooh” and runs a pet crematorium that also burns the corpses brought to him by assassins; the polished, Stanford-educated contractor who also grew up in Old Raccoon’s Doghouse Library; the old man with a mastiff who cultivates his garden far out in the woods and is one of Reseng’s targets--all of them are walking riddles, and all of them are intertwined in a morass that includes government officials.

Un-Su Kim has constructed an eerie, dreamlike world for his characters, one that’s revealed in chapters that appear to be stand-alone short stories. Then their common thread begins to surface: in the library with 200,000 books that nobody ever borrows, the knitting shop run by Mito’s crippled sister where the attic is filled with photos of Reseng, the high-rise insurance building that holds “the luxurious digs of an assassination provider bang in the heart of the Republic of Korea.” 

The biggest puzzle of all is Reseng, a man moving down a dead-end street who never went to school but who grasps the essence of the world he was brought up to inhabit. “There was no better business model than owning both the virus and the vaccine. With one hand you parceled out fear and instability, and with the other you guaranteed safety and peace.” These words resonate with a horrible meaning ten years after they were written. They give The Plotters a dimension that seems to have been written for the time we face in 2020. ~Janet Brown