THE MIDNIGHT LIBRARY (2020)
By Matt Haig
Penguin/HarperCollins, 304 pages.
★★★
The Midnight Library is a fantasy novel, but not of the usual sort. Not many fantasy books stray into philosophy, gestalt psychology, or quantum physics. Nor do they open with an epigraph from Sylvia Plath: “Between life and death there is a library. And within that library, the shelves go on forever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived.”
Plath’s library is the central hook of Haig’s tale. His protagonist is 35-year-old Londoner Nora Seed, the very embodiment of ennui. Nora has a flat affect, which works to anesthetize her from life’s disappointments. She cannot commit, hence her life is a series of flights. She, her brother Joe, and several friends had a band on the verge of a record contract until she, the lead singer, got cold feet. Now she works in a used record shop and is about to be fired. She was engaged to Dan, and called it off on the eve of the wedding. Now she's an introvert living alone with her cat, Voltaire. She gives a youngster piano lessons, but can't connect with him or show up on time and stands to lose that gig as well. She was once a champion swimmer with potential to go to the Olympics, but gave it up. Detect a pattern? Nora’s life is one big “what if?” trail of flops.
When Voltaire is run over, Nora sees no point anymore and decides to kill herself.
Imagine her surprise to find herself in a very different kind of Purgatory–an immense library staffed by Mrs. Elm, a school librarian who once believed in her and helped her discover things that once interested her. Mrs. Elm explains to Nora that her personal Book of Regrets gives her access to try other lives that she passed up. There is probably a finite set of chances, but Nora can pull any life from the shelf and pursue it.
Some might recognize in this the multiverse theory at work. Nora tests numerous paths; among them: rockstar, an Olympian and motivational speaker, Cambridge professor, and glaciologist. She takes lovers, including a schlock actor upon whom she once had a fan crush and Hugo Lèfevre, a “slider” like she going between alt-lives. In other tryouts she’s married, to Dan, who owns a rural tavern; to a cute-but-flaky dog lover; to a rich doctor; and even to a handsome Latin vintner. The sticking point is the butterfly effect; that is, her changes impact others. In some scenarios Voltaire is still alive; in others, he’s dead as is her beloved brother. In each, she is unknown to most of those she knew when she was “alive.” The butterfly effect also means she has no knowledge of people, events, or backstories prior to her arrival at a particular moment in time. Nora must try to piece together things to avoid seeming to be demented.
Another stipulation is that if she returns to the library, she cannot take out the same book again. This is not ideal for someone who can't commit. How long can she continue sliding? Hugo has been going back-and-forth between different lives for a long time, but Mrs. Elm reminds Nora it's different for everyone. If library collapses before she makes a final decision, she will get her first wish: death.
The Midnight Library is a high-concepts novel. Notice my use of the plural. Haig has so many irons in them the fire that he is ultimately like Nora Seed in that he can't quite make up his mind where to take his novel. This results in narrative and conceptual hopscotch in which there are intriguing surfaces, but not much depth. It's as if he stitched together a bit of Sylvia Plath with the movie Groundhog Day, and made detours into speculative physics and philosophy's greatest hits. For instance, Voltaire's resurrections and deaths are ham-handed winks to the Schrodinger's cat conundrum. An NPR review hit the nail on the head by calling The Midnight Library a tale told in a straight line with no twists that ends pretty much where you’d predict it to go. To me, Haig’s internal moralizing feels like he’s coopting Fredrik Backman’s sweetness without his folksy wisdom or his explorations into humanity’s flawed nature.
The saving grace is that this is a goes-down-easy novel with occasional insights that tempt us to see it as weightier than it is. It's a quick read with the potential to spark personal reflections. Those will be the truly profound things to come out of your reading.
Rob Weir
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