"The Midnight Library" by Matt Haig

 In despair, after a life filled with failure and regrets, Nora Seed decides to kill herself. But she finds herself in the Midnight Library, whose shelves are filled with all the books of all the possible lives she could have lived had she made different decisions. Taking down some of those books, she starts to explore her alternative futures. Will she discover happiness before her time runs out?

Written in a very straightforward style, this book reminded me of The Alchemist by Paolo Coelho or The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom and I suspect that if you like these books you will love The Midnight Library. In many ways it is more philosophy than novel, a fable, and mostly I don't like that sort of book, preferring the message of a story to be buried deeply within the story, but this one is much less preachy than most.

It is almost picaresque in its episodic plot and one of the difficulties of this sort of book is that most of the characters are briefly glimpsed and it is therefore difficult to develop them. In this book, even the main character shows little development in her core character, the development being fundamentally to do with her attitude to and philosophy of life. 

The fundamental simplicity makes it read like a children's book but aspects of the content suggest that it is very much aimed at adults: perhaps its core market is young adults and adolescents.

It is beautifully written with clear and elegant prose. There is a clear structure and the moments when Nora experiences epiphanies and revelations occur are almost perfectly at the 25%, 50%, and 75% marks, so it conforms to the archetypal four-part structure.

An unexpected pleasure when I started this book was that it name checks Bedford, the English town in which I lived and worked for over thirty years. It starts in a real school in the town and names actual places (as well as fictional ones). But in many ways it is hugely unfair to Bedford, described at one point as a  "conveyor belt of despair" (p 12). It ignores almost entirely the huge multi-ethnic population which gives the town a special and vibrant character; although Nora's heritage includes Italian and Irish, both key constituencies in the town, and one minor character has a South Asian name, the huge Bangladeshi, Pakistani and Indian populations are more or less ignored, not to mention the substantial Afro-Caribbean, black African and Eastern European communities. One of the other distinctive features of Bedford is that almost half of the places for secondary pupils are in private schools. These features make Bedford much more complex an environment than the rather monochrome backdrop of this book. Perhaps Nora should have explored all her different lives within the town.

Selected quotes:

• "'Cheer up, love, it might never happen,' someone said. Nothing ever did, she thought to herself. That was the whole problem." (p 18)
• "It was a familiar feeling. The feeling of being incomplete in just about every sense. An unfinished jigsaw of a person. Incomplete living and incomplete dying." (p 29)
• "She wondered if her parents had ever been in love or if they had got married because marriage was something you did at the appropriate time with the nearest available person. A game where you grabbed the first person you could find when the music stopped." (p 36)
• "Thomas Hobbes had viewed memory and imagination as pretty much the same thing." (p 53)
• "I'm not useful to anyone. I was bad at work. I have disappointed everyone. I am a waste of a carbon footprint, to be honest." (p 62)
• "Librarians have knowledge. They guide you to the right books. The right worlds. They find the best places. Like soul-enhanced search engines." (p 84)
• "Are there any other lives at all or is it just the furnishings that change?" (p 114)
• "To be part of nature was to be part of the will to live." (p 134)
• "Maybe even the most seemingly perfectly intense or worthwhile lives ultimately felt the same. Acres of disappointment and monotony and hurts and rivalries but with flashes of wonder and beauty." (p 137)
• "From as far back as she could remember, she'd had the sense that she wasn't enough." (p 143)
• "Never trust someone who is willingly rude to low-paid service staff." (p 204)
• "Undoing regrets was really a way of making dreams come true." (p 211)
• "Fear was when you wandered into a cellar and worried that the door would close shut. Despair was when the door closed and locked behind you." (p 215)
• "It was safe to surmise the little-known realities of the multiverse probably weren't yet incorporated within the care plans of the National Health Service." (p 275)
• "There may be a bass drum of despair but there were other instruments at her disposal too. And they could play at the same time." (p 285)

A feel-good 'uplit' book which won the 2020 Goodreads Choice Award for Fiction

December 2021; 288 pages

Also by Matt Haig, reviewed in this blog:

• The Humans

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God