KEY POINTS:
Tours are strange things but I love visiting new places and sometimes I go a little crazy - I've been in Vienna, Jerusalem, London, Moscow in the last few weeks - like a literary bungee jumper. I am here for the Literary Festival and to launch my new novel Sashenka.
Just as Sarah Jessica Parker launched her NY movie in London, so I, on my own much smaller scale, am launching my novel here in New Zealand before any of the other markets in the world. So far I love it here, especially those bungee jumpers who bounce gamely outside my window from the Sky Tower every few minutes.
My publicist asked if I'd like to try it, but I explained that frail English writers are not up to such athletic feats. I went on the Paul Holmes talk radio show at dawn: he is a rumbunctious enthusiast, Rabelaisian history-buff and intellectual magpie after my own heart. In the UK, we don't have any equivalent of such an eccentric radio intellectual. He asks about writing fiction after doing history books for so long.
It's a great release - Sashenka is a story about love and death and betrayal and children in a Russian-Jewish family across the 20th century. The heroine is the daughter of a rich tycoon in the last years of the Tsar, who becomes a Bolshevik.
Under Stalin, Sashenka has her own salon and is the editor of a magazine for Soviet women - she has two children, a grand country house, Stalin comes to her parties and she has survived the Terror but then embarks on a wild and delicious love affair that threatens to destroy everything and she faces the most unbearable choice a mother can face ... In the last part of the book we are in London and Moscow today, in the age of the oligarchs, and an oligarch hires a young female historian to research Stalin's own archives to find out what happened ...
It is based on many true stories, my own time in the archives and the weird characters I've known, from archivists to secret policemen to oligarchs, but it is not really a historical novel - just a story about enduring love and hate and the past. In Russia, everything is a secret - especially the past.
Paul asks about the movie of Young Stalin (I am also promoting my latest biography of the dictator, the companion volume to Stalin: Court of the Red Tsar) that Miramax in LA and Alison Owen (who worked on Elizabeth and The Other Boleyn Girl) are making.
Young Stalin was a bank robber, pirate, priest, poet, terrorist and prolific lover so it's made for movies. Who should play Stalin they ask? As a young man he was surprisingly handsome and a womaniser: Johnny Depp, Brad Pitt, Clive Owen, but actually when you sell the rights, you have no influence whatsoever. All writers are control freaks so this powerlessness is refreshing.
THE STORY of the Austrian "house of horror" is fascinating in both its evil degeneracy and psychopathic blandness. I'm just back from Vienna to collect something called the Kreisky prize for Young Stalin, given by the Renner Foundation which is closely connected to the Austrian Socialist Party - its leader is always one of the judges. So it is as if Gordon Brown took the time while PM to read hundreds of books - can't see that happening somehow.
One of his aides asks why my novel is published as Montefiore and my history as Sebag-Montefiore. I want my fiction to be separate so just use Montefiore for that but my real surname is Sebag-Montefiore; the Sebags are from Morocco, the Montefiores from Italy and my mother's family from the Russian Empire which has inspired my fascinations.
I stayed at the Sacher Hotel which I love for its cake and that Sacher was the cook for Prince Metternich at the Congress of Vienna. At the prize ceremony I sat next to Federal Chancellor Gusenbauer, charming intellectual who really had read all the books on the list. (I tested him.) Later I went off to see the beautiful Belvedere Palace, home of Prince Eugene of Savoy, one of my heroes, and also the place where Hitler held court after the Anchluss. I managed to restrain myself from discussing dungeons, paedophiles and small town Tyrolean secrets.
IN JERUSALEM to research my next history book, a biography of the city and the Middle East. Jerusalem is a colossal subject and that's the joy - I'm facing total Russian archive aversion syndrome. The stress of the 10 years I've spent researching Catherine the Great and Stalin in Russian archives have finally taken their toll and I wanted no archives. I spend my last day in the city walking endlessly through the Old City, getting my head around the complexities of city walls, Roman streets, underground cisterns and the layered fascinations, its secrets, guided by Jews, Moslems, Christians (and that alone includes Armenians, Catholics, Orthodox, Assyrians, Russians, Copts, you get the picture). Every person who shows you round knows something slightly different. The reigning mood on both sides is anger: Palestinians and Israelis blame their own leaders as much as the other side. On my last night, I have some Israeli and Palestinian friends to dinner at the American Colony Hotel; all get on very well but there is a terrible feeling the peace settlement will be signed in around 2025 if not a little later.
BACK IN London at Buckingham Palace, which I have never visited before, for a charity dinner on behalf of the Prince of Wales Foundation for Children and the Arts. The Prince gave a rather moving speech. He spoke about how he had come to found the charity: he visited a school in a deprived Birmingham area where the children's favourite class was Shakespeare and drama, but they had never been to the theatre so he arranged for them to visit Stratford and meet the cast. For most of them, live theatre was a spellbinding revelation. So he created the charity to bring the arts to children, has raised huge sums and brought theatre to thousands who would never usually enjoy it, all supported by a phalanx of stars.
Before dinner, there was a show in which Renee Fleming sang an operatised version of Over the Rainbow, Jude Law did Peer Gynt; Sir Ian McEllen delivered Henry V. But the star turn was the very young actor playing Billy Elliot in the West End and Jeremy Irons who brought the house down with a wonderfully flamboyant and raffish Don't Put Your Daughter on the State Mrs Worthington.
MEETING Austrian Chancellors and visiting Buckingham Palace is considerably more civilised than my crazy days in Russia and the Caucasus especially during the breakup of the USSR when I was covering those war-torn places. I admit I loved visiting the presidential palaces of local dictators and warlords, and riding hell for leather in their motorcades with machine-gunners sitting on the roofs of their armoured Mercs. Those days were a real adventure and I miss them. I had no job, no wife and no prospects then but I was free-falling through all those wars and coups and seeing history real: in some ways they were the happiest times of my life.
With my books on Catherine and Stalin, I've been in and out of favour with the Kremlin. They loved Catherine, hated Red Tsar and now like Young Stalin. But the city has changed so much. When I arrived one couldn't get a hotel room or a decent meal; now it is one of the richest and most decadent cities in the world, full of oil-rich, Putinesque imperial swagger. Incidentally, Stalin's reputation resurges: Putin's new official textbook hails him as "the most successful Russian leader of the 20th Century." But I am very excited because the Russians have bought Sashenka which at least confirms that I've got the Russian-ness of the book correct.
So what lies in stores for the 75,000 fans heading there for the Champions League Cup Final? Moscow hasn't seen an invasion like this since the 1980 Olympics - or perhaps even 1941 or 1812. The Russians certainly know how to control hooligans. Chelsea may think they have a headstart being owned by the Oligarch closest to Putin, but the wily old vozhd (leader) Sir Alex Ferguson has been doing his homework using my Stalin books to study the tyrant's managerial style: "It was eye-opening," Sir Alex said. "How he managed to kill probably 30 or 40 million people and conceal it is unbelievable."
I AM writing this at my favourite place in Auckland. When I tour, I adopt a strict routine out of habit and my routine here is to take breakfast and lunch in my favourite cafe-restaurant in Town: it is called Caffetteria on Adelaide St. Chic and reminiscent of lower Manhattan, it's full of all sorts of Aucklanders - models, fashionistas, writers and businessmen, the food is delicious and healthy, the coffee is the best in town.
The sun has come out and my coffee has arrived. It is great to be in New Zealand.
Sashenka by Simon Montefiore is published by Random House. Young Stalin has just won the LA Times Biography of the Year Prize
Simon Montefiore is appearing in the Readers and Writers Festival today and tomorrow, at the ASB Theatre, Aotea Centre, 1-2pm.
FROM RUSSIA, WITH SUCCESS
Ten years ago, Simon Montefiore's big book deal was a million-pound magazine offer to be at his wedding - not to film the happy couple, but because his wife-to-be, fellow novelist Santa Palmer-Tomkinson and sister of society "it" girl Tara, was expecting her godfather Prince Charles along, and he was bringing Camilla Parker-Bowles.
It was an early public outing for the royal lovers, not long after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales.
Montefiore, 42, a Cambridge-educated journalist who covered hot spots like Grozny, could have used the money, but said no. He has since turned very successfully to book writing full-time and forged a reputation for his histories of Russia: Potemkin about Catherine the Great's lover and political partner; 2003's Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar; and last year's Young Stalin. Both biographies were critically acclaimed and best-sellers.
He is researching a book on Jerusalem and has the launch in Auckland this week of what may be the first of a trilogy set in Russia, a novel called Sashenka.
