Karin's Reviews > Corambis

I so loved reading this tetralogy. It was one of those “I want to read these books ALL THE TIME but I also never want them to end”. Luckily, the four books together were over 2000 pages so they lasted for quite a while.

Magic (so Felix claims) works, or is explained, through metaphors. And therefore The Doctrine of Labyrinths is a very apt name for the book series. It was through following the characters - the two main characters, but also the many side characters - through their trials, through their mazes, avoiding or seeking the heart of the labyrinth, wrong turns and right turns, gathering magic all the while, that I came to care for them so deeply.

I often thought about it - and I hope you know I mean this as true praise - as reading really good fanfiction. Centered round the emotions and reactions of characters one has become deeply invested in: their stupid, conditioned choices and their stupid not-talking-to-each-other and their getting lost in the labyrinth even though they took the only road they could have taken - and then the honesty and openness, when the clouds do part, being all the more important.

Sidenote: there’s a critics’ term, probably male critics’, not certain if it’s Swedish or more widespread, of “housemaid reading” - “pigläsning”. It means involving your feelings in your reading, reading emotionally, considering your emotional attachment to the characters and the story, and not only your intellectual appreciation and understanding of the text. … So, I guess, the opposite of how you read male, white Nobel Prize winners. (No offence to Eyvind Johnson, Albert Camus, and some others. I got emotionally attached to your stories and your characters.)

Sidenote 2: It wasn’t until the second half of the second book that I realised that The Doctrine of Labyrinths can be read not only as really good fanfiction, but, in a way, as a very advanced AU of my incredibly preferred fanfic: Holmes & Watson. (This is not to suggest that the world-building is lacking: it is wonderful, and, to use a word from one review, luscious. And certainly multi-faceted and carrying its own weight.)

Sidenote 3: There have been reviews of this series that haven’t liked the POV-switching, and I’d worried beforehand that this would mean that the author would forget whose POV we were in in a particular scene - but the switches are clearly marked and I think they work very well dramaturgically.