- Overview
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The novel portrays how the world surrounding a boy called 42, a serial number from an orphanage, collapses and is reorganized in a devastating disaster referred to as the Great Flood. The story uses an allegory to illuminate the universal history of mankind crisscrossing through history and philosophy.
- Book Intro
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The backdrop of the novel is an imaginary city, Bimoe-si. The history of this city, governed by Queen Thorn, is a short version of the history of mankind to the present. So, in a way, it is a kind of natural history museum. The story begins with a bat flying high into the air. The bat had survived by eating bookworms in a corner of an antique bookstore. But the day the store closed, he was dragged out into the world. And that very day he was killed by a peregrine falcon. A man selling medicinal herbs discovers the bat’s carcass and sells it for medicinal purposes. Mrs. Glass, who boiled the bat and drank the water, bears 42, a baby resembling a bat. These scenes, which at first glance seem insignificant, fit into a larger story through a chain of events that fall like dominoes as the novel progresses.
42, born in this manner, is one of the few survivors of the Great Flood. The Great Flood refers to a disaster that occurred when a dam, constructed as a major civil engineering project that Queen Thorn promoted to stop inflation, collapsed. The name 42 comes from the serial number given to him, a flood survivor. He was put in an orphanage, but due to his facial resemblance to a bat, he gets the opportunity to go to the palace. How will the life of a child, with a number instead of his own original name, develop?
As the reader can guess from the title, Karma Police, which is also the title of a song by the British alternative rock group Radiohead, this novel tells all the stories of the world surrounding 42 instead of a simple story of one character. Throughout the story, the novel reminds readers of the universal history of all times and places, and doggedly delves inside to see how the lives of the people are closely connected and affect each other like dominoes.
- About the Author
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Hong June-Soung
Hong June-Seong was born in Busan in 1991 and studied philosophy at Pusan National University. His literary career began when he won the 3rd Hankyung Youth Literary Contest in 2015 in the novel category. He wrote the fiction, The Genealogy of Inferiority. @HongJuneSoung