... exquisite and strange ... a postmodern fairy tale, both whimsical and aching in its appeal ... Every careful step the story takes is magic ... Whether read as a romance, a fairy tale, a lament, or combinations of the three: The Dollmaker is a bewitching story.
This literary experiment has a conventional setting, in a contemporary England that feels only slightly askew. Its living dolls are kept within safely figurative bounds, avatars of the exotic in a moving fable of otherness, but they are every bit as unsettling as tradition requires ... Its imaginative energy unfolds unexpectedly from within, as if from a series of opulent music boxes ... purports to be 'a love story about becoming real', and perhaps it is, in its sad and mischievous way. But it is a story, too, about becoming unreal, about what we choose to see, even in dolls, when we ourselves have gone for too long unseen. Who will love us, after all, if not people just like us?
The pace is thoughtful and measured, moving much more smoothly once you become used to the different narratives, building to an ending that is atmospheric but doesn’t seem to provide definitive answers for the questions posed. But whilst some may struggle with its slow start or its ambiguity of its ending, for those who can get past this they’ll find The Dollmaker is a book that lingers on in the mind long after finishing it, much like the tales of Chaplin herself.
... beautifully written and deeply strange ... Not all readers will gel with the book’s structure ... Of the three strands, Bramber’s letters are the most engrossing ... Allan writes about neglect and transgression very well. There are some wonderfully taut scenes in which characters betray one another, often violently. But it is hard to remain gripped by the rest. Andrew’s meandering journey from London to Cornwall is stretched out tediously, and more than once I found myself asking why I should care, about him or anything he is doing ... While Allan has crowded the book with imaginative protagonists — sinister shopkeepers, a paedophilic collector of automata — none, including the dolls, emerges as a character worth rooting for.
For the most part, The Dollmaker is a mainstream novel with distinctly Gothic overtones and a creepy Nabokovian narrator. But the five embedded Ewa Chaplin stories move more clearly toward fabulation, horror, and even dystopian SF – and Chaplin herself is something of a trickster narrator, offering us a slippery dual ending to one of her more compelling tales. Does an SF or horror tale nestled in a non-fantastic narrative make the whole fantastic? Is The Dollmaker partly a collection of Nina Allan stories cleverly wrapped into a novel (a couple had been published separately, in different versions), or are the stories purely functions of the character of Ewa as translated by someone named Blacher and then read by Andrew (who doesn’t seem to like them much) and Bramber? The stories themselves are worth the price of admission, disturbing non-fairy tales that occupy a territory somewhere between Angela Carter and the more mordant side of Daphne du Maurier, but the resonance they gain through odd similarities with Andrew’s and Bramber’s own stories deepens both the tales and their frame. The Dollmaker is a novel that recedes deeper into its own hall of mirrors as you read it, and it’s compelling in the same way: you want to find your way out of these reflections, but you want to savor them as well.
... just as its hero stitches disparate fabrics for his dolls’ clothes, so Allan entwines separate stories and varying styles to produce a novel greater than the sum of its parts ... I liked the first two-thirds of the book more than its final portion. While I appreciated the unconventional resolution to Andrew’s ill-advised and unannounced trip to rescue 'his' Bramber, I wasn’t convinced by a late-book development that has Andrew, previously awkward, unsociable, and lonely but entirely sane, holding conversations with a voice in his head ... Because Chaplin’s stories, and the dolls she created to represent them, are so important to the characters, I rather expected that this mysterious figure would play a larger role in The Dollmaker. Her life is mysterious, her tales seem preternaturally linked to the lives of Andrew and Bramber, and her dolls exert a strange fascination, but we never learn much about her. She loiters outside the narrative, but is never invited in. Perhaps Allan wanted her readers left wondering ... Like the best fairy tales, [The Dollmaker] provokes, it challenges, it moves, and it lingers.
Allan’s characters hide their intense sentiments behind calm exteriors and the overlapping story lines pleasantly delay answers to mysteries. This uncanny novel of longed-for connection is worth the effort.
With alternating chapters—Andrew’s first-person narration, Bramber’s letters, and Ewa’s fairy tales—the book moves slowly toward a quick climax and neat conclusion ... the novel’s constant characterization of difference—whether of size, appearance, ability, sexuality, race, or gender—as either strange, fetishized, or magical (or all three), leaves a lot to be desired in terms of exploring the oppression the protagonist ostensibly works against. There are gay characters but they are predatory; the only black woman character is described as large, and the protagonist speculates about her pubic hair. The many characters with dwarfism are consistently compared to dolls and fetishized by average-size people. While the rich imagery, sentence construction, and deft storytelling lend the novel charm and readability, these aspects of the narrative are disturbing ... A gothic story which explores human nature while sometimes getting lost in stereotypes and unnecessary detail.
