BOOK REVIEW: A writer's opinion

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

 The Midnight Library is my first taste of Matt Haig, a writer who has been recommended to me several times. I have read the odd interview, seen his novels being either raved about or huffily dismissed on Facebook, and they have popped up on reading lists on Goodreads. But, if I’m going to be very honest, I decided to read this novel because of its title. I mean, I was always going to be drawn to a title that combines my favourite time of day and a place that has always inspired feelings of escapism and comfort for me (once I overcome my dust allergy). 

   

I am particularly fond of fictional libraries (a result of said dust-allergy), my favourites being the library at Unseen University in Terry Pratchett’s wonderful Ankh-Morpork, and the library run by the Cheshire Cat in Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series.  Matt Haig’s ‘midnight library’ is more akin to the library in Death’s domain, in Pratchett’s Discworld novels, however, a place where human lives are being written and recorded as they play out.  In a quantum-theory-type variation on what Pratchett refers to as ‘the trousers of time’, Haig’s library contains all the possible lives of a single character, the wonderfully named Nora Seed, who enters this metaphorical/hallucinatory space while wobbling about on the edge of death after trying to commit suicide.

            Don’t let my mention of Pratchett mislead you. Haig’s novel is not a rollicking comic turn, though it is quietly amusing in places and it certainly shares some of Pratchett’s philosophy-lite concerns. Matt Haig has created his own niche-genre, a kind of hybrid between cosy-fantasy and the sort of writing that is often cruelly referred to as ‘chick-lit’ (all that means, in reality, is that it focuses on topics that narrow-minded people consider to be of sole interest to women, such as people’s emotional life, relationships, etc). From what I can gather from internet research, he specialises in coming up with one cool idea and pinning this to the heart of his stories, creating a set of psychologically-plausible characters in situations that could be termed ‘souped-up realism’.  Like John Wyndham, he has cornered the market in middle-class, middle-brow fantasy. 

            The Midnight Library might be a ‘real’ place, a figment of Nora’s imagination as she hovers between life and death, or a metaphorical construct fleshing out the basic idea that she learns to accept and embrace the life she already has rather than feeling like a failure and craving an alternative. The reader can interpret it as they wish. The novel clearly has a message – about self-acceptance, identity-formation, the nature of happiness, the nature of love – and the message is presented in a very direct and uncomplicated way.

            Most of the novel describes Nora’s various try-outs of alternative lives she might have had. What a deliciously appealing idea! Who wouldn’t want to try out a life where they didn’t marry their first boyfriend - or they won Masterchef - or they didn’t accidentally drop the winning lottery ticket into the sea in 1994? The Midnight Library contains an infinity of books, each of which contains a slightly different version of Nora’s life – a myriad of lives where she made slightly different decisions and followed slightly (or sometimes massively) different paths. The lives have to be ones which could conceivably happen, given Nora’s skillset and personality, and she can’t enter ones where she is already dead. Also, they don’t always turn out well. 

            Such a literary conceit requires a lot of patience from the reader so it is lucky for us that Nora is a talented musician, singer and songwriter, a potentially world-class swimmer, academically gifted, attractive, kind and clever. In fact, she has so much obvious potential (even before we discover the Midnight Library) that it is actually quite difficult to imagine that she is genuinely suicidal due to loneliness and a sense of abject failure. I guess this is Haig’s way of showing us that even gifted, likeable and attractive middle-class people can get depressed and try to kill themselves, and that’s not a bad message to highlight. It is also neatly convenient for the plot, of course, as a suicidal young woman who is plain, suffering from an incurable and unpreventable chronic illness, stupid and/or hateful, might not have been so easy to fit into what is, ultimately, an ‘uplift’ novel,  with added fantasy (which might just be all in Nora’s mind anyway).

I imagine that the book will appeal to many readers, and I enjoyed reading it – but now, only a week after I finished it, I can barely remember the details. It was a nicely-paced, pleasant read, a mildly rewarding way of entertaining yourself on a lazy afternoon in a deckchair, but not ultimately the sort of novel that would inspire me to rush out and buy his other books. But that doesn’t matter. Millions of other people apparently think Matt Haig is the bee’s knees, so he doesn’t need my support.

You can follow Matt Haig at: https://www.instagram.com/mattzhaig/

RATING: The Midnight Library ***

Key:
*****      highly recommended - a 'must-read'
****         good - well worth taking the time to read
***           ok - will help to pass the time in a boring situation
**            not very good -  just about readable but flawed
*             not recommended - boring, offensive, badly-written or deeply flawed in some other way