The Porcelain Doll
1991. Rosie is a young doctoral student at Oxford. Until the age of eleven, she was Raisa, and lived in Moscow with her Russian parents and elder sister. When her father and sister were murdered by a contract killer, Rosie and her mother fled to England. Rosie’s reclusive mother is drinking herself to death, her only companions a collection of porcelain dolls and a book of fairy stories she claims to have written. Rosie has the chance to spend three months in Russia as assistant to an acclaimed Russian dissident author who lives in England but has a reason to return to the land of his birth. Rosie hopes she will find the man who shattered her family.
1915. In Petrograd, Tonya is the young bride of a businessman. Pampered, restless, with little to do, she goes for early morning walks and is drawn into the revolutionary movement. How these two storylines relate is the substance of this novel of secrets, revenge, and redemption, through Stalin’s purges, the siege of Leningrad, and the gulags.
The two timelines are clearly laid out, although a map would have been appreciated. The writing has beauty, lyricism, and a sense of place and era. However, the more Rosie discovers in Russia, the more convoluted and anecdotal the narrative becomes, the less substantial the characters, with elements of mystery, fantasy, thriller. I finished the book in confusion, which saddened me after the promising start of quality literary historical fiction.
