The Dollmaker

This is probably a book you either love or hate, since it's definitely off the beaten path and takes a bit of getting used to. I highly recommend perseverance!

Ever since childhood, Andrew has been fascinated with dolls. Later in life he becomes a collector and dollmaker himself. Through an ad in a collector's magazine he gets in touch with Bramber, who is looking for information on Ewa, a dollmaker from the past. They start a snailmail correspondence in which we get to know their characters and surroundings. The writing is easy accessible and moves at a good pace.
Ewa, the dollmaker, is also the author of some short stories, which Bramber gifts Andrew. These stories are woven into our main story. This mixing of book, letters and stories can be quite confusing in the beginning, but once you get their connection, the magic starts to appear.

Well over a year into their correspondence, Andrew decides to visit Bramber. He doesn't announce his plan, but instead travels through England stopping at places that have special meaning to him. A fascinating trip filled with delightful artistry and quirky characters.
Throughout the journey Andrew and Bramber keep writing, Ewa keeps telling her stories. All characters compliment each other. Gotta love serendipity!
The conclusion of the story is simply wonderful, as true magic should be.

The Dollmaker grabbed me and wouldn't let go and I loved every minute of it!

Thank you Netgalley and Quercus Books / riverrun for the ARC.

After falling in love with Nina Allan’s work over the past year, The Dollmaker was undoubtedly my most anticipated book of 2019. You might think I’d have been eager to start reading the second I got my hands on a copy, but actually I was quite nervous about starting it. What if it didn’t live up to my sky-high expectations? What if it was just good rather than wonderful and perfect? I needn’t have worried. This is indeed a wonderful novel, and though I know it’s a bit silly to use the word ‘perfect’, it’s difficult to see what could possibly be done to improve it.

Like much of Allan’s work, The Dollmaker is a narrative made up of stories within stories and worlds within worlds. The framing narrative is about Andrew Garvie, who may be the title character, or may not: he is one of several dollmakers in the book. He has had a largely lonely existence, characterised by unrequited love and a single, exploitative, sexual relationship. A passion and talent for dollmaking have given his life meaning, but have not fully erased a pervasive sense of emptiness.

This begins to change when he connects with Bramber Winters, who has placed a magazine advertisement looking for a penpal. Over the course of a year of correspondence, Andrew comes to believe he has fallen in love with Bramber. But they have never met in person – she lives hundreds of miles away in a residential home named West Edge House. The exact reason for her apparent confinement there is shrouded in mystery. Having developed the belief that the two of them are ‘destined to be together’, Andrew sets off to visit Bramber, and against the advice of his best friend Clarence, he can’t help but see his journey as both a romantic quest and a rescue mission.

In a post on her blog, Allan described her book Stardust not as a short story collection but as ‘a fractured novel’. The Dollmaker might be said to fit that description too. Though Andrew’s narrative spans the whole book, it is interrupted by Bramber’s letters as well as macabre short stories ostensibly written by Ewa Chaplin – another of The Dollmaker’s dollmakers. Andrew is reading these stories not because they particularly interest him personally but because Bramber is a great admirer of Chaplin. Yet as he reads, he begins to find they have strange similarities to some experiences of his own. These uncanny parallels add a frisson of strangeness to the plot, betraying its underlying darkness.

Reading Nina Allan, for me, is like putting on a dress made of the finest silk, or eating a box of exquisite handmade chocolates. You understand you can’t have that experience all the time, but when you do, you know that a) you’re in the hands of an expert and b) it is something to be savoured. She is a consummate master of the short story, perhaps the best currently working, so of course ‘Ewa Chaplin’s’ tales – five in total – are an entire pleasure in themselves. The perfectly formed ‘Amber Furness’ and the pitch-black, erotically charged ‘Happenstance’ have particularly stuck with me. I’m not going to do a deep dive into all the intertextual references, because... that isn’t going to be interesting to most people reading this, but I was quietly thrilled by the threads connecting The Dollmaker to the universe of Allan’s fiction, for example Anders Tessmond’s resemblance to the clockmaker at the centre of The Silver Wind.

The tagline sums up The Dollmaker as ‘a love story about becoming real’, and it’s remarkable how accurate that is. It feels as though Andrew and Bramber are being written into existence – and, as the reader turns the pages, read into existence. Chaplin’s stories, such eerie mirrors of the protagonists’ lives, are as much a part of this process as Andrew’s monologue and Bramber’s letters. The Dollmaker is the sort of novel that speaks to the power of fiction and the possibilities it contains: I couldn’t shake the thought that my imagination was playing an active role in shaping the narrative.

It’s only February, but I already know I won’t read a better book this year. And I’m fine with that, because The Dollmaker is worth it. Needless to say, every character is beautifully drawn and every moment feels both authentic and magical; this novel is an enchanted castle of stories upon stories, a dizzying labyrinth. I wanted to go on reading it, and living in its world, forever.

The Dollmaker - a mesmerising page-turner

It’s a testimony to this compelling novel that the second I reached the conclusion, I turned back to the beginning and started reading it all over again.

Andrew makes dolls, Bramber loves dolls and their mutual obsession prompts Andrew to make the journey from London to the south west to rescue her, like a knight of old. The three strands of the novel – Andrew’s narrative, firmly rooted in reality, Bramber’s letters from West End House, a mental asylum in all but name, and the short stories of Polish émigré Ewa Chaplin – are woven together like a lustrous plait on one of the dolls that Andrew creates.

And, oh, what a force these dolls are. At once innocent as a child but also, looked at in a different light, eldritch – even creepy. Likewise, there’s a running theme of dwarfism. Andrew is technically a midget and, by an uncanny coincidence, dwarves abound in the pages of Chaplin’s stories.

Andrew’s quest has a timeless feel about it. Although the novel’s setting must be contemporary, as it refers to computers and mobiles, Andrew plots his journey using gazetteers, almanacs and railway timetables. His almost pedestrian account (he gives a TripAdvisor style review of my home town of Reading!) grounds the book so firmly that the more fantastic elements seem perfectly credible – an old authorial trick that works especially well here.

I was lucky to receive the text on Kindle through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review, and I can honestly say that I’m sure this will be my Book of 2019!

Just occasionally I did lose track of the characters within the three story strands; not surprisingly as the characters in Chaplin’s stories are often echoed in Bramber and Andrew’s real lives. I wonder whether reading the story in ‘tree book’ form, with clearer physical demarcation between sections, might help here.

What a strange and wonderful book, so very different to anything I’ve ever read.

The story explores the letters between Andrew Garvie and Bramber Winters, who come to know each other through their mutual interest in dolls. Bramber is researching the life of Ewa Chaplin, who was both a dollmaker and writer of macabre fairy-tale type stories. On his way to meet Bramber in the one-time mental institution in which she lives, Andrew reads his way through Ewa’s stories, in the company of a doll he steals.

Are the dolls, the dwarves, the disfigured, and all the other inhabitants of the Chaplin stories playing out the the lives of Andrew and Bramber, or the other way around? The disconcerting mirrorings of the stories in the real-life narrative is clever and creepy. I loved this.

The Doll Maker is a love story. A weird, twisted and fascinating love story, shaped in the same way the doll maker shapes his dolls. In it we read the story of Andrew and Bramber, told slowly and with care, not to show to much at first, but to make us thirsty for more. The book was written in a very clever way, we are fed small parcels of the events in Andrew’s descriptions of his travels and on Bramber’s letters to him. Nothing is revealed to early, or given to us in a silver platter.

On another hand, we can find a book within the book, as Andrew is reading the short stories of Ewa Chaplin, another doll maker/writer. Her stories are as mesmerizing as her dolls, and enchant both main characters, and also us while we read them.

We need to pay full attention while reading this book, especially because when we are buried deep in an Andrew or Bramber passage we are suddenly taken away to a chapter of Ewa’s book, and have to adapt to new characters and story flow. But these short stories are also a pearl on itself, wrap the book in a mysterious aura while at the same time setting a background to the main characters thoughts and feelings.
It is a love story, but also a book about embracing the difference, about daring to be yourself despite everyone else’s opinions, and how all of us make each other suffer with our easy judgement and misconceptions. It is also a speculative fiction book, as we are taken to strange ideas like parallel universes, the definition of time, and other light brushes on science.

I recommend it to everyone who likes a story that is different, daring, bold and is not afraid to embrace difference.

I can hardly wait for this to be published so I can tell my customers all about it. A really original gem that worked on two levels. I adored the characters of Andrew and Bramber and thought the unfolding of their respective stories was skilfully done. The fairytales throughout were amazing - atmospheric fables providing a whole other level to the novel. Most wonderful!