The 1980s are back in fashion — Jilly Cooper, mix tapes, the threat of nuclear annihilation — so it’s perhaps no surprise to see the return of the geopolitical thriller. DB John may not have expected to be hailed as the heir to Frederick Forsyth when penning Red Star Down, but his delightfully audacious spy story, which spans the globe from Moscow to Washington, recalls such Forsyth blockbusters as The Devil’s Alternative, while being rather better written.
Loosely based on events at the time, it is set during Donald Trump’s first presidency and partly in the White House. What, speculates John, might be the impact on intelligence work of a president who makes government policy on the hoof? And, since we are in the world of conspiracies, how susceptible might such a president be to the blandishments of a foreign agent?
Here it’s an undetected North Korean spy, Eric Rahn, who as an adviser to Trump is encouraging him to show South Korea who’s boss by withdrawing the US troops who deter Pyongyang from invading. However, that’s just one strand of John’s plot. There’s much to admire in the way he combines tension with momentum while skilfully juggling the other storylines. These other strands include the fallout from a Russian student, Lyosha, who asks Vladimir Putin an embarrassing question about corruption on live TV (unbeknown to Lyosha, his father is spying for the Americans), and a young man, Stephen, who is hiding from assassins in California.
Linking them is Jenna Williams, the Korean-African-American CIA agent who was the protagonist of John’s 2018 thriller Star of the North. In that book Jenna rescued her twin, who had been kidnapped by North Korea (David John, who has had a career in publishing, has spent time there). Jenna was subsequently made a marked woman after causing the death of the supreme leader Kim Jong-il.
In Red Star Down the resourceful Jenna gets wind of the presence in Washington of the North Korean spy, but the story opens with the blowback from her attempt to recruit Kim Jong-nam as a source. He, it will be remembered, was the son of Kim Jong-il who was assassinated with a nerve agent at Kuala Lumpur airport in 2017.
John’s smart conceit is to enrol real players on the world stage, such as Trump, as minor characters in his novel. This gives him the licence to be downright rude about the president by viewing him through the eyes of the manipulative Eric, who beadily notes his “doll hands” and “marmalade tan”. To Eric, Trump resembles “a giant shrimp” and is “like a guy in a bar talking to the TV”. It’s safe to assume John won’t be on a big, beautiful Christmas card list.
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There are also walk-on parts for Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov — “one of the ring-wraiths around Putin” — the walrus-moustached US national security adviser John Bolton, Theresa May (“a cloud of frosted air”) and the new tsar himself. Undercover, Jenna finds herself at the sharp end in the Kremlin, then fighting for her life on a fast train to Vladivostok.
Gleefully embracing a counterfactual interpretation of Trump’s administration (could he really have blabbed secrets to the Russians?), Red Star Down is closer in tone to Terry Hayes’s I Am Pilgrim than David McCloskey’s more realistic Damascus Station. The climax, at the summit between Trump and Kim Jong-un in 2018, is a mite underpowered, but it’s a lot of fun to read, not least for John’s insight that for the three autocratic leaders politics has become (as with Rome’s emperors) more about dynasty than democracy. Everybody wants to rule the world.
Red Star Down by DB John (Harvill Secker £20 pp672). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members