The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

When I read this quote in the New York Times Book Review: Absorbing …exactly what’s wanted in these troubled and troubling times, I made a point to put a hold on The Midnight Library from the library. My turn came up in early January, and I thought great timing – the book got great reviews, is on the best seller list, and I decided a dose of fantasy was in order.

Trigger warning – this book deals with suicide, which Mr. Haig handles with hope, but a bit simplistically.

Similar (but yet different) to Life After Life (one of my favorite books of last year), The Midnight Library takes on the possibility of living a life over and over again – but with the twist of what if you could view every possible outcome of your life?

The book opens with Nora Seed, who finding her life sad and hopeless decides to end it all. However, life, and the universe, isn’t finished with her yet. Instead she finds herself in a vast library with endless books all of which contain different versions of the life she could have lived. The librarian is none other than her beloved librarian from high school — Mrs. Elm.

This “midnight library” is a place of infinite shelves where all the books are variations of your life. But it is best described by Mrs. Elm:

Between life and death there is a library, she said, the shelves go on forever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be different if you had made other choices.

Together they look at her ‘Book of Regrets’ and Nora agrees to choose various books, and finds herself inhabiting the bodies of a number of different versions of herself, all living lives that could potentially have been hers.

As Mrs. Elm goes on to explain,

Every life contains many millions of decisions. Some big, some small. But every time one decision is taken over another, the outcomes differ. An irreversible variation occurs, which in turn leads to further variations.

After each life lived, Nora returns to the library – not having found the right life and her Book of Regrets changing after each.

Like most humans, while I have loved and still love my life, I sometimes wonder if I had done things differently — what my life might be like. If I’d stuck with music or gone to a different college…the ‘what if’s’ kept me reading The Midnight Library.

Nora has fascinating, but unbelievable alternate lives to choose from — she was an Olympic swimmer, a glacierologist, a doctor, and a rock star. I found myself wondering where is the boring office job life?

Okay, by now, you can tell I didn’t enjoy this book as much as I hoped to. With the ‘trying on these lives in search of a better one’ concept — the ending was clear from the third life she inhabited. I also found it very unsettling that Nora has no idea who the people are in these alternative lives nor does she know her role. I found it annoying having to wade through how lost and confused Nora was every time she enters a new life.

Nora was an interesting character, tightly wound and intense which made some of her dialogue clever. As here:

You’re overthinking this Nora,” said Ravi, “I have no other type of thinking available”.

To be a human was to continually dumb the world down into an understandable story that keeps things simple.

Then the book just got plain old sappy. With such statements as: ‘Never underestimate the big importance of small things.’ And, this slap-in-the-face advice to someone contemplating suicide; ‘Now go on, live, while you still have the chance.’

I finished The Midnight Library only because I wanted to see if I had predicted the ending correctly (I had) and because my book was due to expire digitally in a few hours.

I came away with many unresolved issues, the most important of which was that the author entirely skipped over the consequences of inhabiting other lives. Nora’s actions while inhabiting her alternate lives would have real world consequences for another version of her life.

The concept of consequences is what makes time travel/parallel lives books so fascinating – as with A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.

Life After Life did an excellent job of consequences, as did Mr. Haig’s other book which I enjoyed much more How to Stop Time.

Read any of those books instead.