In Johnson’s North Korea, people are hideously regimented and terrorized, but they do not lose the qualities that make them compelling human beings. In this way, the novel recalls George Orwell’s “1984,” in which the humanity of ordinary people survives despite the best efforts of the torturers and liars who rule their lives. But it’s a funnier and warmer book than that — in the absurd chorus of the loudspeakers that broadcast the Dear Leader’s lies, and in the nobility of individual North Koreans who remain decent and loving even as they suffer. Imagine Charles Dickens paying a visit to Pyongyang, and you see the canvas on which Johnson is painting here.

Johnson’s triumph is the character of Pak Jun Do, the young hero of this Korean version of the “novel of education.” Jun Do is raised in a work camp for orphans after his beautiful mother is kidnapped and taken to Pyongyang. When the regime recognizes his ferocious toughness, he is recruited as a tunnel fighter who can attack in zero light. That leads to a stint as a seagoing kidnapper who plucks Japanese off dark beaches. Then, because of his talent for languages, he becomes a monitor of American radio transmissions at sea.

Jun Do’s rise eventually takes him, improbably, on a secret mission to Texas, where failure leads to his seeming ruin. When he returns home, he is sent to a mine that works prisoners to death and then drains their blood for shipment to Pyongyang. As in any bildungsroman, the hero is driven onward by a quest — in Jun Do’s case, for his lost mother and the elite world in which she has come to reside. To achieve his goal, he must take on the identity of another man and inhabit his uniform and authority, even his house atop Mount Taesong. It’s far-fetched, you might think, but Johnson’s vivid writing and comic sense make these plot details work. You don’t want to put the book down at night; you want to see where the ingenious Jun Do will go next.

But this is not a perfect novel. The subplot in Texas was, for me, a detour that didn’t pay off. It foreshadowed a spy story that never entirely materialized. And Johnson’s Pyongyang seemed much more real than his Abilene.

Some readers will be challenged, too, by the switch in voices — from an omniscient narrator who tells the core story to the loudspeakers that bark out a propaganda version for “Citizens,” to an interrogator-torturer who makes an awkward comic figure. This complex, multi-voiced narrative testifies to Johnson’s standing as a professor of creative writing at Stanford. And his mosaic, puzzle-solving way of storytelling will remind some of David Mitchell, author of the similarly inventive “Cloud Atlas.”