Stephen May used to write contemporary novels about men who ‘live outside big cities, lack self-confidence and rarely feature in contemporary fiction’, as he once put it, adding: ‘Even Nick Hornby’s characters are more sorted than mine.’ But a chance discovery of a Wikipedia page about the three weeks that a young Stalin spent in Edwardian London sent May’s imagination hurtling back through the decades.
The result was Sell Us the Rope (2022), his sixth novel, which imagined what Koba, the Georgian then better known as Joseph Dzhugashvili, got up to in 1907 while attending the Fifth Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour party. May mixed the real with the fictional to great acclaim. Hilary Mantel called him the ‘spry, sardonic voice of the new historical fiction’.
For Green Ink, May takes us back to London again, this time in 1920, and David Lloyd George, that great peacemaker, peerage-seller and philanderer, is prime minister. We meet him in flagrante at Chequers, in a draughty bedroom, muttering threats to his Honourable Member. ‘I was cajoling Mr Pidyn, the MP for my own girl. I was telling him to behave, to rise, to do the right thing,’ he tells Frances Stevenson, who is much more than merely his mistress. As the first female private secretary to a prime minister, she is the most powerful woman in Downing Street. ‘She helps shape the whole damn world,’ writes May, via an omniscient third-person narrator who remains unnamed until the epilogue.
Lloyd George, Stevenson’s ‘Welsh bull’, is distracted by ‘this political fund debacle’, as he regards the cash for honours scandal.
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