The Midnight Library

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig is one of those rare books I bought purely on the blurb text. I was wandering through the bookshop, this must have been one of the first times back after the last lockdown, and noticed a dark blue book with a bright house on the front. And a cat. You can always trick me into picking up your book when you put a cat on the front. I knew the author from his Reasons for staying alive book, and I knew he wrote other things, but I hadn't heard of this particular book. The blurb told me it was about Nora, who "at the stroke of midnight on her last day on earth [...] finds herself transported to a library", where she can "undo her regrets and try out each of the other lives she might have lived". Well, who doesn't want that? Who, in random moments, hasn't thought about choices and regrets and mused how their life may have turned out if they'd done things differently? And who doesn't want to know that happens when you actually get the chance? So this book was coming home with me.
(It was only later that I found out that this is a hugely popular book, finding it's way into top 10s and top 5s and 'must read this summer' lists. I just loved the premise on the blurb.)

So the book turns out to be closer to Haig's self-help novels than I first thought. Nora doesn't just 'live her last day on earth'; she commits suicide. Because her life has gone downhill; she has been fired, she doesn't have any loved ones around her and her cat has just died. Not seeing any way out of the mess she finds herself in, she decides to end things. Then she finds herself in the aforementioned library, surrounded by books that all contain a version of her life where she made different choices. But before she can delve into those, she has to face The Book of Regrets. For someone who feels so miserable they have chosen to end their life, the Book of Regrets felt like an unnecessarily cruel addition, but there you are.

Nora's first choice is to see what would have happened if she'd stayed with her ex boyfriend and opened a country pub, as was his big dream. Now the trick is that the books don't take you back to the moment you made the choice. They take you back to exactly the same day, exactly the same time. So in each story she is thirtyish and it is the stroke of midnight. Safe to say, the whole boyfriend thing didn't work out in this life either, after which she finds herself back in the library, ready to pick another version of her life.

Now Nora is a pretty special person. Apart from swimming at a very high level until she was a teenager, she also played in a band and wanted to be a geologist. In the library, she finds out that she could have been an Olympic medallist, or a world-famous singer in a relationship with an equally world-famous movie star, or a world famous geologist doing research in Spitsbergen, if she'd pursued any of those ambitions. And that is where the story came apart for me. There is no way that if Nora kept on swimming, she would automatically have become an Olympian. There must have been thousands of variants of the story in which she chooses to keep on swimming and still doesn't achieve much. It would have been so nice to find out she would have had a pretty average life in most cases (which, let's remind ourselves, is still better than the mess she finds herself in now), instead of the fame and glory that she immediately dives into.

Not that those lives turn out to be all that great, mind you. But still, the whole 'reaching the top of your field' angle didn't feel quite right. 

But that is one of the only two minor downsides to the novel. The structure of the novel is neat, with some really short chapters that just contain a single sentence or a single chant interspersed with the 'regular' longer chapters.  Nora is a pretty complicated character, who grows throughout the novel, realising life is more than the choices you make. 

We get to know a variety of people around Nora; her parents, her brother, her friends. We learn how her choices affect them and the choices they make. After living so many lives, Nora starts to see people close to her in a different light, from an elderly neighbour to the young kid she teaches piano. She realises she means something to them, that she influences the way their lives play out, and vice versa. She realises her choices matter, but that the people you live your life with matter more. Without spoiling the ending, which some reviews find too 'happy', I can safely say this book will make you look differently at any missed chances of regrets you may be beating yourself up about. And knowing everything Matt Haig himself has been through, I think he is well equipped to teach us something in that area.