By Geoffrey Cain
The Wall Street Journal  

Jun 11, 2019 

In Kim Jong Un’s North Korea everyone seems to live in fear, even as living standards rise slightly thanks to minorreforms.

‘Marshal, your father and your grandfather did some f—d-up s—. But you, you’re trying to make a change, and I love you for that.” So declared Dennis Rodman, the retired Chicago Bulls basketball player.

It was February 2013, and Mr. Rodman had finished watching a basketball game and was downing sushi and shots of liquor. The person he was addressing, Kim Jong Un, the supreme leader of North Korea, held the titles of Invincible and Triumphant General, Guardian of Justice, Best Incarnation of Love, and the Sun of Mankind. Everyone nervously held his breath.

Mr. Kim, then believed to be 29, wasn’t someone you’d want to anger. He ran a network of concentration camps. His regime later executed his uncle. Then his half-brother was assassinated with a nerve agent. Luckily, Mr. Kim smiled and raised his glass. The supreme leader then got “wasted” with Mr. Rodman, according to a person at the party.

The scene is recounted in Anna Fifield’s ambitious and surreal “The Great Successor: The Divinely Perfect Destiny of Brilliant Comrade Kim Jong Un.” Ms. Fifield brings us to an isolated nation where wealthy apparatchiks dine with American basketball players while others suffer in prison camps; where drug dealers smuggle methamphetamines while new-wealth entrepreneurs set up Italian restaurants; where everyone, it seems, lives in fear and uncertainty but where the standard of living is rising, thanks to limited economic reforms and flourishing black markets.

As a foreign correspondent for the Financial Times and then the Washington Post, Ms. Fifield has covered North Korea for years, getting closer than almost any other journalist to the enigmatic regime. In 2016, she landed the first interview with Kim Jong Un’s aunt, now a dry cleaner living in New York. This April, she revealed that North Korean officials, astonishingly, handed a $2 million hospital bill to American diplomats for the medical treatment administered to the American tourist Otto Warmbier, who was arrested for supposedly stealing a political poster, held in custody for more than a year and then returned to the U.S. grievously ill.

 Ms. Fifield excels when she interviews refugees who overturn the stereotypes of being forever miserable, showing that North Koreans can engage in some degree of conspicuous consumption —as long as they don’t openly criticize their leader. “When boys came up to talk to me, I’d check out their phone,” a wealthy young North Korean woman from Chongjin, a relatively well-off city by North Korean standards, told Ms. Fifield. If the smartphone was the local brand that cost $400, she’d give that boy a “second look.” Yet, says another, “If someone is drunk and says Kim Jong Un is a son of a bitch, you’ll never see them again.”

Outside these few scenes and interviews, however, with their clashes of wealth and terror, “The Great Successor” falls flat. It is not a full-dress portrait of Kim Jong Un or a reported journey inside his ultra-secret regime. It reads like a chatty succession of newspaper articles—an amalgamation of interviews, photographs and state-media sources—that go around in circles, repeating themselves, jumping between times and places.

As a result, the book lacks the coherent storytelling and psychological insight that propel the best biographies. We learn that Mr. Kim has loved power since childhood, throwing tantrums and bossing around his cook. But we never know for sure what he thinks about economic reform, nuclear weapons or his summits with President Trump. The Supreme Leader is ever

Ms. Fifield attempts to compensate by accumulating small facts. We hear about the garden in front of Kim Jong Un’s school in Switzerland, the topics of the books in the school’s library, and the AstroTurf field next door. We get meandering descriptions of photographs. One “shows Kim [Jong Un] with a smile, wearing a silver necklace over his black T-shirt.” His sister Kim Yo Jong “appears in the grainy family photo taken under the tree in Wonsan in 2009.” We hear over and over about Italian restaurants and sushi bars for the nouveaux riches, as well as inline-skating rinks, amusement parks and brand-name apparel.

The author shouldn’t take the blame for all these shortcomings. Little is known about the inner workings of North Korea’s regime, and little can be known, in part because so few high-level figures have defected. With this dearth of first-hand sources, though, Ms. Fifield passes off conjecture as fact. “The Great Successor,” she writes, “understood that by simply allowing a constrained form of capitalism, he could give people the ability to earn their own money and let them work their way to a better life.” Statements like this one are probably true. But Ms. Fifield is not able to bring us close enough to Kim to say for sure.

Ms. Fifield’s effort to write a thorough portrait is admirable under the circumstances. But as long as archives are closed and the regime is standing, it is too early for a biography of this mysterious and impenetrable leader. Ms. Fifield does still report colorful stories, like Dennis Rodman’s absurd and tragic visits.

In 2017, she writes, Mr. Rodman “had been invited to North Korea at precisely the same time as the American diplomatic team was going in to retrieve Warmbier”—the American student who was effectively being held hostage. “It appeared that the North Koreans wanted Rodman to unwittingly stage a diversion.”

Mr. Rodman showed up wearing a shirt promoting a marijuana-related cryptocurrency, delivered a copy of Mr. Trump’s “The Art of the Deal” and returned home without meeting Mr. Kim. Warmbier was sent home too, but in a coma. American diplomats had negotiated his release. He died six days later. North Korea handed the U.S. Treasury Department the $2 million hospital bill. “And there it stayed,” Ms. Fifield writes, “unpaid.”

Mr. Cain’s “Samsung Rising” will be published next year.

The article was originally published in The Wall Street Journal