I don't believe this will be a quick review. "The Great Prince Died" warrants comment and cautions. First, if you are not familiar with Trotsky and pre-Russian Revolution socialist politics, this book will be a challenge. I think it's fair to say the author assumes the reader has a more than passing familiarity with these topics. The story is interesting but without the background, the reader would struggle.

The author's style can also be a tad off-putting. Much of the novel's start (and the story itself in fact) is presented as dialog between characters with whom the reader has been provided no introduction. This style can be very powerful and effective but in historical fiction (at least in this work) the reader can be left asking "who the hell are these characters"?

The author also often uses sparse punctuation and short staccato sentences. The feeling I got was the author was over-using a style with which he was familiar but not proficient. Often the story could have benefited from some direct narrative.

So, did I not like the work? In fact I did like the novel. It added personal dimensions to the harsh historical facts. The complexity of the characters struggles add depth to their typically brief stereotypes. This extent of this complexity is effectively portrayed as the characters grapple with the political events and theories of the time. And, the political and personal struggles extend beyond the historical context addressing perennial themes such as personal accountability and societal change.

The novel's credibility is underlined by the author's having spent eight months living in Trotsky's compound in Mexico. If you have an interest in the historical characters, socialist politics and/or pre-World War II history, this is a worthwhile read.

[The Appendix by the author and the Afterword by William T. Vollmann are invaluable for a deeper understanding of the historical context.] ( )

It seems the border between fact and fiction has become blurred, for some publishers’ promotions at least. Am I right to understand a ‘non fiction novel’ to just be a piece of non fiction with imagined dialogue?

I think IT is just ‘based on actual events’. But in this case, only loosely. Some of my favourite books are examples, but in a slightly different way. In Thompson’s “This Thing of Darkness” (about the Fitzroy voyages) the author uses imaginary conversations, but also fictionalises parts when history doesn’t tell us what actually happened. He includes a lengthy afterword in which he makes the fictional parts clear. Another is Simmons’s “The Terror”, which I read at the same time as Lambert’s “Franklin”. Lambert of course has no answers as to what finally happened, whereas Simmons sticks his neck out and entertains us.

I'm all for those explanatory afterwords, and wouldn't have much to complain about if they were generally included in works of historical fiction. Bernard Wolfe did an excellent job in this area in “The Great Prince Died: A Novel about the Assassination of Trotsky”; I thought this was an excellent novel, but it contained the kind of free-wheeling fictionalization of the facts (changing Trotsky’s name, moving the date of the assassination) that usually raises my hackles. Wolfe’s afterword, or “Author’s Notes”, was thorough in accounting for these changes and giving his reasons for them; his thoughtfulness and the sense of respect he showed toward the real-life figures in the story in this postscript completely lowered the aforesaid hackles.

The problem is not always with authors. I understand that Josef Škvorecký provided a similar afterword to "Dvořák in Love" but that the publisher refused to include it, which I feel was treating the book’s potential readers as if they were incurious morons (an impression reinforced by the same publisher's failure to use the novel's brilliant original title, "Scherzo Capriccioso"). ( )