I liked the way these also fleshed out the kind of child he was, introverted and insecure, but how his great talent for swimming took him out of himself and gave him confidence. The use of flashbacks is done well to show how Yu-Jin’s relationships - with his mother, his late brother, his adopted brother and his aunt - shaped him. This is reflected in a narrative voice that gets increasingly more disturbing as the story moves forward. Think Francie in The Butcher Boy or Joy Stone in The Trick is to Keep Breathing.
It’s a good depiction of an unhinged mind.
And it’s that kind of unpredictability that is probably why I kept turning the pages. I can’t explain it very well here because that would spoil the plot, but you cannot second-guess anything in this novel. As soon as I thought I knew what was going on and why Yu-Jin behaved in a certain way, the author would throw in a new bit of information that made me reassess all that had gone before. I liked the ever-changing nature of the story. I do, in fact, wonder why I bothered to read it. As the narrative progresses it gets increasingly more unhinged and abhorrent. Structured in four parts, all narrated by the son, the story charts Yu-Jin’s life living under a semi-lockdown with an over-protective mother. There is no sign of forced entry, so if he didn’t kill her, who did? But did he kill her? He has no memory of the night before because he has stopped taking his epilepsy medication and that often results in massive headaches and blackouts. It tells the story of a 25-year-old man who wakes up to discover his mother dead on the kitchen floor, a deep wound in her neck and blood everywhere, including on his own hands and clothes. So begin’s You-Jeong Jeong’s The Good Son, a locked room mystery that morphs into something much more dark and sinister. Translated from the Korean by Chi-Young Kim. Fiction – paperback Hachette Australia 309 pages 2018.
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