May charts a middle course, crafting an oft-sober, occasionally droll portrait of a monster-in-the-making. Impressively, he finds a flicker of humanity in a person who became a mass-murdering despot ... The book's title paraphrases a pitch-black communist quip: Capitalism marches workers to the gallows, but not before making them buy the rope that will hang them. It's in this spirit that May melds coarse jokes... and wry observations.
Stephen May weaves real-life events with fictional imaginings to create a novel that defies easy categorisation: a convincing slice of history that is also a darkly comic tale of political intrigue and a revealing portrait of the dictator ... In May’s telling, Koba has murdered his brute of a father: he cannot shake his ghost, either in his waking hours or in his dreams. While this lends the narrative an undeniably Shakespearean echo, the rather more prosaic truth is that Stalin’s father died of cirrhosis two years after the London congress. By rooting his Koba in so fundamental a fiction, May plants a niggling worm of doubt about the integrity of his creation. Cavils aside, this remains a deeply satisfying novel.
The historical facts furnish May with a cast of legends to bring to life, and he does it with verve and humour ... The novel’s most clear success is not in this realm of historical insight (although the research is evident and well deployed), but in the cruel course of human events, a proxy war among the delegates that takes hold in the novel’s third and strongest act. May ensnares his characters in a net of intrigue that keeps the reader with him to the denouement — no mean feat since we all know what happened next.
In electing Koba/Stalin as his lead character, May sets up a dynamic whereby on every page we compulsively compare the figure before us, domineering and vengeful, yet not without sensitivity and even kindness – indeed a sometime poet – with the dread tyrant he is to become ... I wasn’t always sure if Sell Us the Rope adds up emotionally. Koba’s Rosebud-like attachment to an urchin named Arthur, who symbolises the abused child he once was... seem oddly generous traits to imaginatively grant a man who would go on to coldly order the deaths of millions ... Sell Us the Rope... reveals the texture of history as an all too human bricolage of private resentments, sexual slights, flawed personalities and mixed motives. At times, May too obviously projects contemporary attitudes into the past, as when Lenin strategises about winning over philanthropists by appealing to their desire to be on that fabled plane, 'the right side of history.'
The story is energised by a delicious frisson: we know what lies ahead for these disparate characters. More intriguing, perhaps, than Trotsky’s ice pick or Stalin’s death as a raddled tyrant is the space May gives to the minor characters in this story ... How you respond to this intelligent and readable novel will depend largely on the extent to which you are able to square its presentation of Stalin with the mass murderer who would come after.
With a spare, sardonic style, May probes Stalin’s childhood trauma, sense of charisma, and brutally violent side, humanizing him without sentimentalizing. Secondary figures, too, are incisively evoked ... This is superb.
Though the novel exposes the stark contradictions of communism at every turn, May is less interested in political theory than comic spectacle ... A subtly menacing portrayal of the future tyrant and mass killer.
