This is a novel that unabashedly mixes fact and fiction. Red Star Down by D.B. John, who was brought up in Wales and is a rare Westerner who has been to North Korea, is based around events that occurred during the first presidency of Donald Trump, with the storyline colliding along its journey, in little or large ways, with Trump, Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-un (the latter two are pictured together on the home page), John Bolton, Sergey Lavrov and Theresa May. The list of fictional key players includes Jenna Williams, a CIA agent; Eric Rahn, an adviser to Trump who is in fact a product of North Korea’s seed-bearing program – women being sent abroad to be impregnated by men of other races so their offspring might infiltrate the world as spies who do not look oriental; and ‘Lyosha’, a Moscow student who must be made to pay for attempting to humiliate Putin on national television.                                                                                                                                                    

The plot repeatedly takes us around the world, from Malaysia to the United States to Russia to North Korea to Germany to Singapore. Amid the travel there is a great deal of mayhem and not a little violence. But also not a little nuance. We know who the good guys are, but the ‘baddies’ sometimes have quite profound motives behind their actions. The ending is satisfyingly and realistically opaque, because as in the real world, events are always evolving. In fact, the ending is not the ending…one of the five sections of the Author’s Note that follows is entitled ‘Trump’s Disclosures of Classified Information’. Are you shocked?

I cannot say how realistic or otherwise the portrayal of geopolitics in this book is, but it sure as hell is topical even as we enter Trump’s second term in office. It’s a month ago that Trump met with Putin in Alaska. At a previous meeting, in Helsinki in 2018, the only other American in the room with them was a female interpreter. In Red Star Down, translation duties are performed by a Russian-speaking woman, with no one else in on their conversation. In the book, one character has been unsettled by the apparently warming relationship between Trump and Kim. “I was afraid that if Kim asked Trump to give me up, Trump might say yes,” he explains. In real life in 2018, that was the predicament potentially facing Bill Browder, an American-born financier who had tangled with the Russian government. At that same summit in Helsinki, he and millions of others heard Trump effectively say he’d think about handing him over to Moscow.   

A notable character in the book is Kim’s sister. Following the recent Kim/Putin/Xi pow-wow in Beijing, it seems Kim’s actual daughter is perhaps being groomed as his successor. While the seed-bearing program forms a fundamental part of the fictional plot, there is also the matter of the approximately 28,500 US troops based in South Korea. In the book, the issue is that Trump, urged on by Eric, is thinking of unilaterally withdrawing them. In the White House last month, Trump told South Korea’s President Lee that instead of America’s forces being there to solely protect the government in Seoul (sorry!), he wanted them to be ready offensively in case there was a need to combat China in respect of Taiwan. This book is almost as confusing as the real thing.

Finally, and randomly (which is how these things go), I read story in The Times ten days ago about a deserter from the Russian army in Ukraine. His name was Lyosha.