Reviews of War Dolls
The title alerts the reader to the complicated territory of this collection. For many if not most of the characters, vividly brought to life, the world is not so much a stage as a battleground, full of skirmishes and hardships, feints and defeats, forced marches and midnight watches; the need for endurance is paramount and victory is hard to identify, let alone achieve. Many of Rose's characters face impossible choices, but her unity of vision does not lead to a narrow or repetitive collection. On the contrary, the stories are wonderfully far-ranging.
Times Literary Supplement
For both writer and reader the short story offers focus, engagement and withdrawal - quite a different experience from the enticements of the longer narrative. Yet a collection of stories from a skilled hand compels you to read on, just as the good novel does. Dilys Rose's stories have that imperative. Where is she going to next? Whose life is she going to unwrap? She ranges from continent to continent, from city to seaside, from small room to wide open space, from truculent children to embittered adults. And she always takes the reader with her.
This is Rose's third collection and her best. There is a gritty, journalistic quality about her writing, which is not to suggest that it is superficial. Far from it. It captures the surface, then peels it back. Indeed, many of her stories turn on the mismatch between surface and what lies beneath.
Literary Review
Dilys Rose has a way with voices. In Swan Lake, the first in this collection of 18 stories, the reader shares the vision of a lonely vagrant who has crossed Europe on foot, and now lies in a hospital bed.
Out of his jumbled yet sensuously precise memories, a touching story emerges. In her economical, subtly symbolic prose, Rose creates not just voices, but whole lives. Many of the characters in this volume tell their own tales, many are on the edge in one way or another.
They are poor or lost, perhaps damaged or floundering; a failed suicide, a bereaved father, a man who longs to be a woman, a young girl isolated by her deafness. Each of the stories, like the characters, is distinctive, yet threads run through the collection. The relationships between parents and children are explored in several stories tinged with menace…while the stories in this collection are compact, aparently modest, they evoke difficult emotions and open out large issues. And, although Dilys Rose makes writing look effortless, make no mistake, to do so takes talent, skill and effort. Like Rose's two previous collections of short fiction, War Dolls deserves serious respect.
The Herald