It begins like this: Thirty-one-year-old Jeong-su is out for a walk in Seoul one Sunday night, following an argument with his father. A strange dark object blocks the alley. Jeong-su’s neighbor touches the object and is absorbed into it. Then it comes for Jeong-su:

The object was a black orb, roughly two metres in diameter. It resembled all at once a large bowling ball, a black weather balloon, and a metal marble. And despite its large size, it made no sound as it moved. Although it wasn’t chasing Jeong-su fast enough to catch him, it was unrelenting and persistent in its pursuit, almost as if it had locked on to its next target. (p. 6)

Jeong-su panics and runs away. He tries to make the few people he sees understand the danger, but how can he explain the inexplicable? He leaves everyone else to their fate. Footage of the orb emerges next day, the news spreads, and so does the danger, as orbs multiply and cover the globe. A process of social breakdown ensues, but Jeong-su keeps out of the way and tries to find his parents.

It’s apparent that Jeong-su is not well equipped as a viewpoint character to convey the weight of an apocalypse to the reader. He is not a person of refined observation or acute self-insight (nor would most people be, but this is fiction, which makes Jeong-su’s nature a deliberate choice on the part of his author, Ewhan Kim). For example, Jeong-su wonders why he didn’t act differently on that first night:

But why had he spent the entire night cowering in his car instead of calling the police? He had called everyone, his family, his friends. The only people he hadn’t called were the police. Why? Had he called them, he could have saved dozens of lives. (pp. 25-6)

But that is as far as he can get with this self-questioning, and this is pretty standard for him (as often as anything, his motivation seems to be working out where he’ll obtain his next supply of cigarettes). What we get from him as a viewpoint character is piecemeal witnessing and acting on instinct, which is appropriate for a novel so focused on not knowing.

Kim writes in his author’s note that “[i]t always seems like people are on the run from something, without ever knowing exactly what they are running from. Indeed, what is the source of our anxiety? Is it social or is it personal? And if there is a solution, what would it be? It is these questions that I have tried to address in this book” (p. 359). The black orbs are, then, an embodiment of an unknown destructive force that just keeps on coming. Jeong-su goes through a series of encounters with people, each of whom offers, to echo Kim’s phrasing, a different solution to the problem of trying to get by in a world of orbs. Jeong-su’s presence brings the personal into the social, often uneasily.

One of Jeong-su’s encounters is with a refugee camp in an abandoned elementary school. The leaders insist that it’s safe, everyone seems happy, and there don’t appear to be any orbs about. But Jeong-su can tell that these people are hiding something. It turns out that there is an orb in the school grounds, but the camp holds it at bay by surrounding it with a circle of people joining hands. The theory goes that, since the orbs always head towards the nearest person, they will keep still if no one is closer than any other person.

So, here we have a group of people working together to maintain the safety of their community, but it requires constant effort, and the danger is right there to overwhelm them if they lapse for even a moment. It’s no surprise, perhaps, that the camp takes on the feeling of a religious cult:

These people thought the reason they were safe here was because of ‘God’s help’. Outside these walls was an army of black orbs bringing about the end of the world. But in here, where they had worked together to defeat the orbs, was God’s kingdom. (p. 100)

Jeong-su tries his best to fit in here, but this way of living is not for him. Tensions rise gradually, until the safety of the camp collapses in dramatic fashion and Jeong-su moves on. This is an example of how Kim makes emotion kinetic in The Black Orb: Jeong-su doesn’t just reject a sense of community; his rejection becomes a grand theatrical set piece with consequences in the external world.

The novel’s single longest episode sees Jeong-su holed up in a department store with a twentysomething “kid” named Jong-seok. The school camp might have been wrong that forming a circle around the orbs was protective, but Jeong-su and Jong-seok discover incontrovertibly that they are impervious to the orbs as long as they’re touching each other.

This leads to a forced intimacy which is not comfortable for Jeong-su, and Kim traces how this situation gradually turns ugly and deteriorates. The two men’s living conditions grow squalid, and Jeong-su ends up throwing out ever more lurid tales of machismo, from insisting that hard drinking is necessary to schmooze clients in his job as a salesman, to extoling the virtues of violent discipline when he was in the army:

People must suffer to become something [says Jeong-su] ... Violence teaches men things they can’t learn any other way. I was an idiot when I was a private, but I got better, and eventually my superiors were complimenting me, telling me I’d become a man. And when I got some seniority behind me, I happily beat up the newcomers. (p. 242)

 It’s as though Jeong-su feels instinctively threatened by his closeness to Jong-seok, even as it’s meant to be keeping him safe, and he lashes out by projecting a crude sense of self and masculinity. When community is at hand, it seems Jeong-su can’t help but destroy it, which makes him as dangerous as the orbs, in his own way.

It turns out that touching Jeong-su shielded Jong-seok from the orbs because Jeong-su is innately immune to them. As the novel begins its closing act, Jeong-su is apparently the lone human left, wondering what he’s doing, orbs shadowing him like curious but wary animals. Then, as inexplicably as they emerged, the orbs fuse together and disappear—and the absorbed people come back.

In this new world, people don’t understand what happened, but rumors, tales and speculation multiply on the internet. Video emerges of Jeong-su and Jong-seok, alive when others had been absorbed. A consensus forms:

Netizens agreed that Jeong-su and Jong-seok needed to be found and questioned about the circumstances of their survival. They pretended that they weren’t driven by anger, but Jeong-su could sense otherwise. They needed someone to blame. He’d be crucified if he was caught. Jeong-su had become the target of everyone’s anger. He had no choice but to run. (p. 314)

Jeong-su finds himself on the move and hiding away again, but there’s an irony to his situation. Before, he ran away from the orbs when he didn’t need to: He could have confronted the darkness, protected a community. Now, that community no longer needs him, and has itself become more of a threat to him than the orbs ever were.

There is one more of those theatrical scenes, a mock trial in which Jeong-su is held to account for what he has done throughout the book. Society, it seems, is working itself out without him—or maybe the story of The Black Orb is taking place entirely in Jeong-su’s mind. Either way, this scene underlines that the true darkness lies inside him (perhaps inside all of us), and is not so easy to escape from.

The Black Orb is broad-brush in its approach and style, but no less effective for that. It is the first of Ewhan Kim’s many books to appear in English translation, and I look forward to more.