Author: Matt Haig
Publisher: Canongate
Reviewer: Stephen Keim
Matt Haig is a purveyor of speculative fiction and The Midnight Library (“Library”) is a workof speculative fiction.
Haig was born in 1975. He has written both fiction and non-fiction and works for adults and children. A lot of Haig’s work touches on issues of mental health and this interest is acknowledged to have been inspired by a mental breakdown he, himself, experienced when he was 24 years old. Haig has published nearly 30 books, including eight novels since his first novel in 2004.
Nora Seed is 35 years of age. Conveniently for the book’s thesis, she is absurdly talented. In her mid-teens, she had the potential to compete and be successful in competitive swimming at world championship and Olympic Games levels. As a musician, she was an accomplished, self-taught piano player with an ability to perform in both modern and classical genres. She also wrote songs and performed as a vocalist in an emerging rock band.
Nora was also academically talented with a passion for philosophy including the works of Henry David Thoreau and Aristotle. She had strong humanitarian values and wanted to contribute to preventing climate change from destroying the planet’s ability to support human life.
By the time she was 35, however, at the opening of Library, Nora felt that all of this talent had been wasted; she had let the most important people in her life down; and that she was a waste of a carbon footprint on the earth. She had not even managed to escape the town of Bedford, the county seat of Bedfordshire, a matter most young people in that town might regard as sufficient reason for deep depressive episodes.
And, so, she overdosed.
Rather than running into Lucifer or Saint Peter, Nora finds herself in a Tardis-like library where time is frozen at midnight and the infinite array of shelves contain books all bearing covers of different shades of green. The one other person who shares the library with Nora is her old school librarian, Mrs Elms, who had, during Nora’s schooling, been kind to Nora, especially, in moments of tragedy and grief.
Mrs Elms explains that Nora is in a unique state of inbetweenness, between life and death, akin to a modern-day Schrodinger’s Cat. Each of the infinity of books (apart from a heavy tome documenting each and every regret that Nora had experienced during her life) represents a possible life that Nora might have lived had she made a different decision to the one she had made at a particular point in time.
Better still, Nora can choose any of those books such that, by doing so, Nora can be parachuted into a particular life at a precise moment and find out how her life might have been had she not made the decisions that led to the sorry state that led her to take an excessive and unhealthy number of sedatives but moments before. There are complications from the circumstance that Nora has no memory when she arrives from this alternative life. Her new close friends and partners and even mere workmates and acquaintances think she is a bit odd since she asks about things with which this Nora was intimately acquainted from the days or years before her parachuting in. But, in most of these lives, this is the least of her troubles.
And, so, Nora finds out what would have happened had she not backed out of her wedding just days from that event; what her life would have been like had she not abandoned her father’s dream of her becoming a swimming champion; and what success would have been achieved had she not abandoned the rock band in which her only sibling, Joe, and his best mate, Ravi, and she were the would be stars of the future.
The terms and conditions of this arrangement were pretty favourable to Nora. If she did not like these alternative lives, she could come back to the library and try another one. If she were content, she could stay in that life and live it to the end. There was even a possibility of going back to her own life if she changed her mind and chose to go back.
As in most speculative fiction, the improbable imaginings which make up the plot in Library are justified by reference to scientific theory. Library draws on quantum mechanics and the idea of parallel universes to add internal plausibility to the plot and maintain the reader’s suspension of disbelief.
But Library, properly understood, as with many of Haig’s works, is about psychological not scientific truths. Most of the alternative lives experienced by Nora turn out to be unliveable such that she returns to the library, quick smart. It turned out to be a good decision to back out of her wedding and not such a bad decision to give up competitive swimming or the dream of rock stardom.
This experience could have led to a negative conclusion. If giving up on my most deeply held dream were a blessing, it might just be the case that I was destined for a terrible life no matter what I chose to do. So, giving up on the prospect of happiness is the only sensible choice. But abandoning regrets might have its own positives and its own unexpected consequences.
So, Nora continues to explore her alternative lives. She learns valuable lessons on the way. Eventually, she must apply those learnings and make a definitive choice.
I read Library in two days, a rarity for me. For much of the first half of the book, with a degree of detachment, I admired its clever construction and its fine use of geographical, scientific and philosophical learning. But, as the crisis was reached and the denouement unfolded, my eyelashes were wet and it became difficult to see the words on the page without repeated blinking.
My test of a good novel was met.
