“People live here, just like anywhere else” – hearing this spoken aloud, especially from a mother showing her son their new home, does something strangely familiar. With so little written, so much is said! It burns the mind in uncomfortable ways, without knowing why, or what, is happening exactly.

Small, instinctive turns like this fill the prose of Hwang Sok-yong, most of which slip-by unseen and detached from the impact that they are having. Hwang writes almost in the negative spaces of description – the less he lays out on the page, the closer and more emotional the reader feels. Looking back you think, in puzzlement, ‘what just happened? How did that simple novel, with such understated text, do so much to me?’

It’s not an easy question to answer, and it’s certainly not luck – Hwang has this down to an art now. As Hwang gets older, and his books become thinner (without diminishment), it’s hard to not get the feeling that he could write just about anything, on any topic, no matter how brief, and it would all still feel very meaningful; sitting in the reader’s thoughts for weeks afterwards.

This new home that we are introduced to early, is a place of cardboard and plastic and Styrofoam and linoleum, a place where flies are eaten by the “pint” and everything is a “short trip from bowl to mouth”. An island of “two thousand households” built into “the slopes of the hill”. It’s a slum! On a patch of garbage!

Bugeye – nicknamed as such after a police officer threatened him, “Don’t roll your eyes at me, you bug-eyed little punk! (All of the children are re-christened things like Baldspot or Mole or Toad or Stink Bug or Beetle or Scab) – is moving into one of the shanties with his mother, and into a new job as her assistant. Rubber gloves, pitchfork and collection basket in hand, they filter through the mounds of new trash that arrives each day from the neighbouring city.

“The garbage trucks began to file in”, and the best items are snagged quickly by the crowds of pickers, fighting for the higher-priced recyclables. Bugeye is stationed in the second-line, behind his struggling, yet always capable, mother. He searches for “yogurt bottles, empty cosmetics jars, broken plastic dippers and basins, cans, glass bottles.”

The grandfather of modern Korean fiction has left a lot of himself in this novel, with old, favourite literary devices running into the pages, and coupling the lost characters. Hwang loves a ghost story, and here they are – through shamanistic dreams – linking the development and change of a fast moving Korea to something more aged, more fragile, more wholesome.

It’s a theme that connects to the garbage itself, dragged and discarded from the new world next-door – “Each item carried with it an air of sadness or regret”.

Even those few years, that unique and dangerous time in Korean life, when Hwang was in his pomp – both as a writer and presumably a man – trickles gently before the reader, with subtle references: when Bugeye’s father is arrested and sentenced to a lengthy spell in prison, it’s because “the new general had seized power and declared that he would clean up society”. And instead of an unpleasant cellblock, he marks-off the passing years in an unpleasant “re-education camp”.

Through the maggots, crushed soda cans, the smell and the grime, this is a community of the type that Hwang admires (he was jailed in the 1960s for supporting the labour union movement, and then later sentenced to seven years in prison for travelling to North Korea in 1989). This is ugly and dark, but the garbage also shines wonderful, “iridescent” colours of “black and white and red and blue and yellow…”

There is also a lot of the translator, Sora Kim-Russell, in this novel, with whimsical and oddly British turns of phrase littering the language: “faraway land”, “wasn’t too shabby”. With the only possible exception of Deborah Smith, Kim-Russell is at the apex of her game (Korean-to-English literary translation). Everything flows so well that even small glitches in the elegance of the prose – like using “so big” and “so huge” as pivots in the same sentence – don’t catch the reader like they otherwise might:

“The cap was so big that it slid down until the rim touched his nose, and the combat boots were so huge that he had plenty of space left”

For the people that live in this public squalor, and make it a home, it is Flower Island! And strangely there is money to be made, “three times as much” as Bugeye’s mother previously could working at a market back inside the city limits.

With all the fights and bruises, the late-night drinking and gambling, the long – grinding – days of unfulfilling work, everyone on Flower Island grows up fast and happy. Parents are fluid, people break-up regularly, swap lovers, with new mothers and fathers moving into the vacated bedspace of the small plastic-walled huts; to leave again a month or so later.

There is an adventurous lawlessness to it all – life has to be light and unattached, or it quickly becomes intolerable and vicious. The only real constraining rule on Flower Island is also the most obvious one: “laugh it off” or leave.

With no space or time for tantrums, children are treated as adults. The care and concern is real, but it can never be too involved or smothering – if sons and daughters don’t come home for dinner, or don’t come home at all, it is casually assumed that they are eating and sleeping elsewhere, comfortable enough, and safe.

Until it’s not, in sudden, unexpected, and wonderfully paced shifts of the narrative. When a late rampage of fire grips the slums, with trash and homes burning as one, everything hits an appropriate panic – watching the residents struggle towards the island’s outer limits, away from their lives and their income. The reader fizzes in the heart of this fear and heat, across page-after-page, and then the fire dies and everyone takes a few calming breaths. Only for Hwang to – almost as an afterthought – drop in a single, final, resonating sentence: “Baldspot’s body was discovered two days later”.

Like the blue lights that keep appearing, pulling the characters between shamanistic worlds, past and present and tenderly lost, there is a lesson here – something that every police detective and stalker already knows to an art.

When the Chuseok holiday comes around in early autumn, the food waste begins to multiply and change – “once-frozen rice”, “shucked oysters”, “whole fish”, “heads of cabbage”. Then as the weather gets colder it’s “hello coal”, and so on… It is amazing how much you can learn from someone by going through their trash!

Outcast and hated, Flower Island unavoidably has the pulse of the city next door – watching in the darkness and distance, knowing, devoted, admiring, and living off its appetite. It is only when they reach-out for some affection, step over the gate, befriend the guard dog, and begin testing the locks, that Familiar Things also become dangerous and “unloved”.