The Great Successor: The Divinely Perfect Destiny of Brilliant Comrade Kim Jong Un by Anna Fifield was another rapid read about the DPRK. I drink this stuff up yet because I have already read so much about the country I didn’t learn much, aside from more detailed circumstances that led to the downfall (and later execution) of Kim’s uncle-by-marriage Jang Song Thaek. Also, Fifield wrote about Dennis Rodman’s visits to North Korea, which entailed up close and personal meetings between the basketball player and the Great Successor. As the flamboyant Rodman sat joking with the Korean dictator, acting as though they were the closest of friends, the US administration stood with its collective mouth agape:
“This was very annoying for the foreign policy establishment in Washington, experts and officials who had advanced degrees and language skills and had been analyzing this rogue state for their entire careers. They wanted to know everything they could about this mysterious menace, but they didn’t want to ask for information from someone who was definitely not an expert, someone who they viewed as a washed-up publicity seeker.”
Rodman spoke without any prepared notes or likely without any advice on what to or especially what not to say. On his first visit, while addressing Kim, Fifield reported he said:
“‘Marshal, your father and your grandfather did some fucked-up shit. But you, you’re trying to make a change, and I love you for that.’
“Everyone held their breath. Then Kim Jong Un raised his glass and smiled. Phew.”
Anyone else who said that, even a visiting American, would have been taken away and executed. I wonder how the interpreter phrased Rodman’s F-bomb for the Great Successor.
Fifield wrote about Kim’s childhood and his education in Switzerland. It was interesting to read about his former Swiss schools and the secluded lifestyle he led. I was last in Switzerland in 2009, just as news about Kim Jong Un was being released to the world, and my Swiss friends from my Romansch class were telling me all about him, based on the local newspaper stories that had been published there. So Fifield’s book, published in 2019, wasn’t that much of a revelation.
The critical praise on the back cover lauds Fifield for her gift of storytelling, and that is true. The Great Successor was a book I could not put down, as she made North Korean history excitable reading. The critical remarks tended to be more academic in nature yet the one from General David Petraeus stated “Intelligent, insightful, sometimes comic”. The first comical aspect is seen in the book’s title. Yet it was Fifield’s lighthearted prose that enabled me to race through this book. Fifield portrayed Kim as a fragile yet dangerous Humpty Dumpty more like Oliver Hardy than Winston Churchill. In spite of the North Korean regime’s savagery, its famine and poverty, there is no other way to write about Kim spending millions of dollars on water parks and ski resorts without making him seem like a deluded emperor. Fifield could only roll her eyes, shake her head and let out an exasperated “What the–?” as yet another showcase luxury goes up while more of the country’s citizens starve.
It was interesting to read a developing profile of Kim’s sister Yo Jong. Four years later, her own book came out in the English market.