Just Finished Reading: The Midnight Library by Matt Haig (FP: 2020) [288pp] 

Nora Seed has had enough. Enough of the regret and disappointments of life, enough of the ‘what ifs’ and missed opportunities, enough of the worry – just enough. With the loss of her (admittedly dead end) job and the recent death of her beloved cat she has decided to end it all, tonight and so she does – or doesn’t, it’s not exactly clear. She awakes outside a large building and, having nowhere else to go, she enters to look around. Finding herself in an enormous library she reaches out for a curiously coloured book – all in various shades of green covering – only to be stopped by the librarian. Nora can’t decide which is more surprising, the library itself or the fact that the librarian is the same woman employed by her school decades earlier. She is, assures the kindly librarian, not dead at least not yet. She has time to browse the shelves and pick a life she might have had, a life where different choices were made and different life paths followed. This is her opportunity to erase her book or regrets and live a life she’d always wanted. Will she pick a life where she stayed in her brother's band and became an international success? Or a life studying glaciers in the far north or Norway? A life as a Philosophy lecturer in Oxford or managing a home for abandoned dogs? So many choices, so many paths. As long, that is, she knows what to choose and what will make her happy – and as long as she has the time. 

I’d read some of the author’s non-fiction before and was intrigued by his fictional works. This was, despite what I’d heard recently, a delight although rather tinged with darkness. Nora is being treated for depression so there’s aspects of mental health that won’t be to everyone’s taste. Plus, there’s the initial heavy suicide motif and (if that wasn’t enough) feline mortality issues. So, be warned... If you’re made of sterner stuff and can read beyond this the rest of the book is intriguing indeed. I’m sure we’ve all thought of opportunities missed, offers turned down, paths not followed and wondered if we’d be happier, more fulfilled, more at peace if we’d had the courage or the luck to make different decisions. So, the gift of trying on these other lives like taking a suit out of a half familiar wardrobe is going to be hard to turn down. It’d definitely be an interesting way to spend your time in the afterlife's waiting room/library. Told, I think, with a great deal of sensitivity (the author himself suffers from and writes about mental health issues) and a lot of humour this is a thought provoking read par excellence. I found myself having to put the book down more than once to think about the questions raised and the implications of the ideas being discussed between Nora, the librarian and other people in her various ‘lives’ she followed through books off the shelves. Only really two things (slightly) bugged me: why were the book covers various shades of green and why were the books of varying thickness (I presume this denoted the length of lives lived but it could’ve been for other more obscure reasons). The only thing I really struggled with was how to classify this book to know which labels to apply to it. There was some discussion of the Multiple Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics which would (at least potentially) fit it into the Science-Fiction category but I’m more inclined to err on the side of Fantasy with a slight SF tinge around the edges. If you’re interested in a thought provoking read with a healthy dose of philosophical ideas to mull over this is definitely the book for you. Recommended and more from this author to follow.   

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