Sell Us The Rope, by Stephen May,
SANDSTONE, £8.99 REVIEW BY ALLAN MASSEY
In an end note to this historical novel, Stephen May quotes the philosopher and occasional novelist George Santayana who declared that “History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren’t there”.
This offers the novelist leeway. May’s book comes with a warm recommendation from Hilary Mantel who calls May “the spry, sardonic voice of the new historical fiction”.
The chief character is Joseph Stalin, long before he became Stalin and was known as Koba, a Bolshevik revolutionary, poet in his native Georgian language, and bank-robber, also a spy and informer for the Okhrana, the Tsarist secret service.
The setting is London, the occasion the 5th Congress of the Russian Social Democratic and Labour Party. Banned in Norway and Denmark, such was the confidence of Britain in the high noon of Empire that it was permitted in London.
Koba is the central figure: morose, suspicious, resentful, simmering with suppressed anger, but also intelligent and a poet, capable of sympathy with some. He has an affair with a young Finnish delegate, and also forms a friendship with his landlord’s son, an boy called Arthur Bacon. He is a real life figure who gave his impressions of Stalin to a newspaper in 1950 – by which time he was voting Conservative.
May has an admirably light touch. He writes with a pleasing economy. Most scenes are short, rarely prolonged before what is needed. He writes with sympathy and understanding of his characters.
In short, this is a richly varied and very enjoyable novel. A lesser writer would have made it much longer. It is apparently May’s sixth novel, but he is new to me. If his previous ones are even half as good they are surely worth reading.