Book Review
Title: The Midnight Library
Author: Matt Haig
Genre: Literary Fiction/Contemporary
Rating: *****
Review: I haven’t read anything by Matt Haig in the past, but I have heard nothing but good things about The Midnight Library and I decided to give it a go. We are introduced to Nora Seed, first as a teenager where she has just quit swimming which she was extremely good at and is pondering on her life, specifically the life she is going to live. We then jump forward to when Nora is 35 and witness the events that led her to decide that she is going to take her own life. This process starts with the death of her cat, Volts which spirals into her losing her job and her part-time piano tutoring job and she begins to realise how she isn’t needed by the people around her. We also learn that Nora has had the opportunity to do a lot with her life and ran away from them. She could have been an Olympic swimmer and ran because of the pressure, the band she had with her brother was offered a record contract and she ran away from it, she even ran from the opportunity of having a husband and family which had led to where she is now as she leaves her brother a voicemail and writes a suicide note before taking her life.
As we approach the ¼ mark in the novel, Nora has taken an overdose but finds herself in the mysterious Midnight Library where she is told by the librarian that all the books in the library contain her other lives. These are the lives she would have led if she had made different decisions about the things she regrets. In The Book of Regrets one thing that constantly stands out to her is the fact she didn’t marry Dan and she travels to a life where she did marry Dan. In this life they fulfilled Dan’s dream of buying a country pub and running it, but this isn’t a good life, or one Nora wants to be in. She doesn’t want to be there because in this life she married Dan but he cheated on her several times and after therapy they are trying to conceive a child but Nora still isn’t happy and neither is Dan so she decides to return to the library and see another of her lives. Even though this is only the first life she has seen Nora is beginning to realise that even though she regrets some decisions they weren’t the right ones for her to take in the first place.
As we cross the ¼ mark in the novel, Nora continues to visit other lives she might live but none of them are the one she wants. She visits a life where she went to Australia with her friend Izzy, only for Izzy to die in a car accident a month later and she got stuck there. She visits a life where she kept swimming and made it to the Olympics a few times but at the cost of her parents since her parents got divorced and her mother began drinking when her father meet a younger woman. However, she is closer to brother in that life, but she doesn’t play music or read the way she did in her core life, and she is still finding herself unsatisfied with these other lives. Haig is genius at crafting the element of free will and how a choice doesn’t necessarily result in the desire consequence which is what Nora is slowing coming to realise. The question I have at almost halfway through the novel, is what is Nora going to do in the end, is she going to die? Or will she find a life she will live through happily?
As we approach the halfway mark in the novel, Nora visits yet another one of her lives but this one is the one where she pursued her dream of becoming a glaciologist. At first, she likes the sense of adventure this life gives her but after almost being attacked by a polar bear she is beginning to rethink whether this life is from her, but something very strange happens. She meets a man on the boat called Hugo and he explains to her that he is doing the very same thing, visiting his other lives and he has been in this one for 5 days and he agrees to tell her more about the process since he seems to notice that Nora doesn’t really have a clue what is going on or what she is supposed to be looking for. I really liked this little twist in Nora meeting someone else that is travelling through their other lives and I am hoping that she and Hugo might meet in their core lives if neither of them die of course, and maybe begin to create a life that neither of them imagined. I have to say that I wasn’t expected much from The Midnight Library, but it is currently blowing my mind and I can’t wait to see how it end.
As we cross into the second half of the novel, Hugo explains that there are infinite lives they are now visiting but they are essentially Schrodinger’s cat as they are both alive and dead at the same time until they either die in their core life or settle in another life. Despite a brief entanglement with Hugo, Nora soon finds herself back in the library and wanting to visit the life where her and Joe’s band, The Labyrinth’s are famous. However, the outcome of this life isn’t one she wanted as even this life has been touched by so much tragedy and death as her brother who was the lifeforce behind the band overdosed two years before. In the wake of this Nora doesn’t want to continue visiting other life and wants it to end but we know this isn’t true and that she is saying these things to try and run away from the emotions she is feeling which seems to be something Nora has always done. Being so far into the novel now, I still have no idea where Matt Haig is going to take Nora, but everything seems to be building to something, whether that is death or Nora settling in another life I don’t know. It may even be her returning to her core life where she might have been saved from overdosing by someone.
As we approach the ¾ mark in the novel, Nora continues to cycle through so many lives and finds nothing worth staying for and is losing her way. As she loses hope in finding a life she will love, the library is beginning to fall apart around her, but she decides to give it one more go and asks for a life where she accepted Ash’s offer to go out for coffee. In this life she is married to Ash and they have a daughter, Molly and a dog, Plato and she is happy. After playing a game with Molly to find out the details of this life, Nora is beginning to feel like she might have found the life she could continue to live in as she has a loving husband, a child, her mother is still alive although not her father and she is close with her brother, meaning that some of the major regrets she had don’t exist in this life but she isn’t 100% sure yet. With less than 50 pages left in the novel, I am eager to see how Matt Haig ends Nora’s story and to see where Nora actually ends up as we have become very attached to her throughout the course of the novel.
As we cross into the final section of the novel, Nora settles into a life with Ash, but she begins to see people that she knew in her core life that have harder lives than she knew they had in her core life. This causes her to withdraw from the life and end up back in the library which is falling apart but Nora has finally decided to live and with the help of Mrs Elm she gets back to her core life where she manages to survive the overdose and begins to make things right with her life. Overall, The Midnight Library was a beautiful read that I highly recommend to all and it also has a very realistic look a mental health issues.
Buy it here:
Paperback/Hardcover: amazon.co.uk amazon.com
Kindle Edition: amazon.co.uk amazon.com
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