Book Review: The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

 

★★★★☆ - Four Stars

I have a weakness for books about books.

Put a library on the cover and I'm already halfway to the till.

Tell me it's a magical library containing an infinite number of books representing all the different lives you could have lived?

Fine.

Take my money.

The Midnight Library follows Nora Seed, a woman overwhelmed by regret and convinced that her life has amounted to very little. When she reaches her lowest point, she finds herself somewhere between life and death in a mysterious library.

But these aren't ordinary books.

Each one contains another version of Nora's life.

What if she'd made a different decision?

What if she'd stayed with someone?

What if she'd pursued a different career?

What if she'd said yes instead of no?

Nora is given the extraordinary opportunity to find out.

I loved the idea immediately.

Because who hasn't wondered?

I can lose twenty minutes wondering what would have happened if I'd ordered something different for lunch, so give me the opportunity to investigate every major decision I've ever made and I'm going to need considerably longer than one night.

The clever thing is that Nora initially thinks she knows which decisions ruined her life.

She has a mental catalogue of regrets.

If only she'd done this.

If only she hadn't done that.

If only she'd been braver, more successful, more committed.

But actually experiencing those alternative lives proves rather different from imagining them.

And that was the part I enjoyed most.

We have an irritating tendency to imagine the road not taken as though it would inevitably have been the better one. We picture all the good things that might have happened without considering the completely different collection of disasters that could have been waiting around the corner.

The boyfriend you regret leaving might have made you miserable.

The dream career might not have felt like a dream once you were living it.

Getting the thing you desperately wanted might have meant losing something you didn't realise mattered.

Nora gets to discover that first-hand.

I also liked that the alternative lives aren't simply tiny variations on the same existence. Haig gets to have fun with the premise, sending Nora into wildly different versions of herself and allowing the book to hop between possibilities without becoming bogged down in any one of them.

It makes for a very easy read.

Perhaps a little too easy at times.

This is where I can understand some of the criticism the book has received. There were moments when I felt as though the message was being explained to me rather more clearly than necessary.

I got it.

Regret is complicated.

The apparently perfect life might not be perfect.

Happiness isn't necessarily waiting in the life you didn't choose.

You don't have to tell me again.

And again.

Occasionally the novel wanders rather close to self-help territory, which has divided readers. Some have found its message deeply moving and hopeful, while others have thought it overly sentimental or too obvious. That split is certainly visible in the enormous number of reader reviews the book has accumulated.

I landed somewhere in the middle.

I didn't find it life-changing.

But I did find it touching.

There were several moments that made me stop and think about the way we judge our own lives, particularly how easy it is to measure ourselves against things that never actually happened.

We're remarkably good at mourning imaginary versions of ourselves.

The successful one.

The richer one.

The thinner one.

The one who took that opportunity.

The one who didn't make that mistake.

Meanwhile, the real version of us is sitting here wondering why she can't possibly measure up to a person who doesn't even exist.

That's quite a thought.

The library itself was probably my favourite part of the novel. Endless shelves stretching away, each book containing another possible life.

Although knowing me, I'd completely forget about the existential crisis and start checking whether they had a crime section.

Priorities.

The Midnight Library won the Goodreads Choice Award for Fiction in 2020, and with millions of reader ratings since, it clearly struck a nerve.

I can see why.

It's accessible, imaginative, emotional and very easy to disappear into for a few hours.

Did I occasionally want it to trust me a little more to understand what it was saying?

Yes.

Did I still close the book feeling rather differently about the words what if?

Also yes.

And perhaps that's enough.