The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

 

288 pages

Publisher: Canongate

Blurb

'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. To see how things would be if you had made other choices... Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets?'

A dazzling novel about all the choices that go into a life well lived, from the internationally bestselling author of Reasons to Stay Alive and How To Stop Time.

Somewhere out beyond the edge of the universe there is a library that contains an infinite number of books, each one the story of another reality. One tells the story of your life as it is, along with another book for the other life you could have lived if you had made a different choice at any point in your life. While we all wonder how our lives might have been, what if you had the chance to go to the library and see for yourself? Would any of these other lives truly be better?

In The Midnight Library, Matt Haig's enchanting novel, Nora Seed finds herself faced with this decision. Faced with the possibility of changing her life for a new one, following a different career, undoing old breakups, realizing her dreams of becoming a glaciologist; she must search within herself as she travels through the Midnight Library to decide what is truly fulfilling in life, and what makes it worth living in the first place.

Review

I bought this book when it first came out after seeing rave reviews. What’s more, I follow Matt Haig on Twitter and I love his positive messages. Besides, what’s not to love about a book featuring a library filled with books depicting alternate lifelines? Libraries have held a magical gravitational pull for me for as long as I can remember. It started with me as a borrower, and it remains true now that I’m a librarian.

Now that I have finished the book, I’m not entirely sure how I feel about it. It’s a beautifully written story with a fascinating and original premise. It is also an easy read, despite its deeper message and references to philosophy and quantum physics.

Nora’s journey starts on the day she loses her job and her cat dies. It’s too much. Nothing in her life is right and nothing has been right for too long. She can’t face anymore life so she chooses death. Next thing she knows, she finds herself in a library in which all the books look the same and none appear to have titles. The librarian is someone she remembers from her school days. Mrs. Elm was there for Nora when she needed a shoulder to cry on while in school and it appears Mrs. Elm is here for Nora again now that she needs someone to help her make sense of the mess that was her life.

Mrs. Elm is such an appropriate name. It could, of course be a coincidence, but I doubt it. Not when the spiritual meaning of ‘elm’ is as follows:

 

Elm acknowledges that life's difficulties can create the illusion that we are isolated, alone and misunderstood. This can leave us feeling powerless and therefore trapped. The elm spirit is here to gently encourage us to rethink our situation from a different perspective.

 

Throughout the story, Nora visits alternative lives; those in which she made different choices and discovers who she would have been as a consequence of following those other paths. Along the way she learns lessons. About herself, about the choices she made, and about the people she encountered on her journey.

The object of her journey is to determine once and for all whether she really wants to die and, if not, how she wants to live. I’m not going to say anything else about either the journey or Nora’s final decision except that the story ends on a positive but thankfully not magical or too good to be true note.

“She realised that she hadn’t tried to end her life because she was miserable, but because she had managed to convince herself that there was no way out of her misery.”

I guess it’s fair to say that I enjoyed this read. The story sucked me in and didn’t release me until I read the last page. The book also made me think…a lot, which is a good thing. I love books that make me wonder or question things. However, not all my thoughts and questions were completely positive. Below are some of the thoughts I had while reading the book. I typed them out as they occurred to me and I’ve decided to leave them like that. This may well mean that they make little sense to those who haven’t read the book. It is also possible that I repeat myself once or twice, and I can’t rule out that they don’t contain a spoiler or two. So, if you haven’t read the book yet but are planning to do so, proceed with caution.

 

Thinky-Thoughts

• The premise is wonderful, but to me at 50 pages into the story, somewhat imperfect. Nora is playing the ultimate ‘what if’ game. But surely there is no such thing as the perfect life for any given person. All decisions have consequences. Every path chosen rules out numerous other paths left unexplored. And there is no such thing as happily ever after in real life. Every life, regardless of the choices that brought us to it, includes the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly, joy and heartbreak and I guess mostly happy is the best we can hope for. But I’m still at the start of this book. For all I know, this is the lesson Nora must learn in The Midnight Library.
• It’s funny, I would have said asking the ‘what if’ question when it comes to life decisions is a bit like setting yourself up for dissatisfaction and doubts. I make a point of avoiding the question unless there is an opportunity to still end up on the path I initially rejected through my choices.
• The first alternative life Nora visits is the one where she married Dave and they opened a country pub together. It opens her eyes and shows her that maybe she didn’t make a mistake when she pulled out of the wedding but… As valid and as clear as the message that the grass isn’t greener elsewhere is, Nora jumps to that conclusion as a result of what she observes and learns in less than an hour. She and we see all Dan’s faults but because Nora hasn’t lived that life, she doesn’t know anything about what led up to Dan’s current state of being or what role Nora may or may not have played in that journey. And she doesn’t really question it either.
•  A big problem for me is that the alternate lives Nora gets to contrast against the live she lived and rejected don’t actually compare to her lived reality. In the life she lived she was aware of who she was, who she interacted with, and why she did or didn’t do certain things. She’s thrown into the alternatives without any background knowledge. It isn’t comparing like with like if you have a history and current knowledge in one setting and nothing to hang on to in any of the others. How can Nora judge whether or not any alternative life is better or worse than the one she lived without knowledge of how she got to that particular point in time or about the people she shares it with?
• As Nora discovers, different decisions my lead to different outcomes, but only on a superficial level because the person at the root of those decisions is the same in every ‘simulation’. Hence she finds she is on the same medication to manage her depression in most lives, no matter how (un)successful.
• I keep on coming back to the fact that Nora enters her alternative lives without any knowledge about who she is and what, exactly, she does in that existence. How is she supposed to decide which life to make her own if she is a stranger in all of them? In fact, I’m starting to feel that this book could be told in the same fashion while heading to the opposite conclusion; In every single life she enters, she is out of her depth and therefore incapable. It doesn’t matter how successful she is in any particular incarnation, because it isn’t her. So she’s bound to make a mess of the speech she has been booked to make and to confuse the ending of a pop concert. She wasn’t there for all that build up to the moment she’s just entered, so how can she make the moment her own and feel at home in it? Nora is learning to appreciate life again. But wouldn’t it be just as easy to use those experiences to reach the conclusion that no matter where she is, she ends up making a mess of things?
• I guess with this book it is a simple case of ‘I love the message but I’m not sure the vehicle delivering it is quite up to the task’ for me.
• I do wonder if maybe I’m overthinking this story and its message. Then again, is it even possible to overthink a book that was so obviously written to make people think about their lives and how they react to and deal with its ups and downs?

 

Which brings me to my conclusion. From reactions on Twitter and Goodreads, where 79% of the ratings are either four or five stars, it is clear that this is a much-loved book. What’s more, it appears to have helped people in that it brought them a message they needed to read. The whole Covid/lockdown situation over the past 14 months may well have played a role in that, but that doesn’t diminish the value of this story (for those people).

Don’t get me wrong. I did appreciate the message. God knows there was a time in my life when this book might have been exactly what I needed to help me find a little perspective on what was happening. In fact, there is probably nothing wrong with the book. I think I may have gone in with my expectations raised too high. Maybe I expected this work of fiction to provide answers it was never supposed to give. And maybe I had non-fiction expectations about a fictional tale. In the end, I still stand by what I said at the start. The Midnight Library is a well-written story, well told. The premise is intriguing and if there are flaws in the execution, they didn’t spoil Nora’s story for me. If you’ve ever wanted to read a book about life, its meaning, and embracing all its opportunities, I urge you to pick up The Midnight Library.

 

 

 

Circles Around the Sun by Molly McCloskey

233 pages

Non-Fiction: Autobiography / Memoir

Blurb

When Molly McCloskey was a young girl, her brother Mike - fourteen years her senior - started showing signs of paranoid schizophrenia. By the time Molly was old enough to begin to know him, he was frequently delusional, heavily medicated, living in hospitals or care homes or on the road.

When Molly reached the age Mike was when he became ill, she found herself suffering from deep anxiety and drinking heavily. She knew that schizophrenia runs in families, and at times the anxiety was so bad as to make her wonder about her own sanity. As the years passed, years when Molly — having moved from the US to Ireland — hardly ever saw or heard from her brother, she became deeply curious about his life and about what might have been. Through reading an astonishing archive of letters preserved by her mother and grandmother, and interviewing old friends of Mike’s, she began to piece together a picture of his life, before and after the illness struck — the story of how a gifted and well-liked student and athlete was overtaken by a terrible illness that rendered  him unrecognizable.

Now, in Circles in the Sun, she tells that story — which is also the story of her own demons and of how a seemingly perfect family fell apart and, in the end, regrouped. It is a work of extraordinary intensity and drama from a wonderfully gifted writer.

My thoughts

“But it isn’t always those closest to us who see things clearly, or see them coming.”

I always find it harder to review non-fiction books than I do fiction. With a fictional tale there’s the question as to whether or not I liked it, enjoyed it, could lose myself in a different world and felt a connection to the characters. Of course those are aspects I don’t get to investigate with a memoir / biography, especially one that tells the tale of something as stark as schizophrenia.

On the other hand, there are a few things I can and will ‘judge’ all books on, such as the question whether or not the narrative was well written and how easy or hard it was to stick with the tale. So I’ll talk about that.

Circles Around the Sun is a very well written book. Apart from the fact that I’m convinced the author did all the research required to give her personal story a factual backdrop, she managed to turn what could have been yet another ‘woe-me-tale- into an intriguing and informative narrative in which the mixture of personal and general information was just right for me personally.

“What the rest of us will do is reinterpret that past. We will say there were signs — the separateness, the sensitivity, the bouts of introspection inappropriate to his age — but this may have less to do with him than with a desire to console ourselves. For some reason, we must believe that there were clues and that we saw them. That it was a secret he couldn’t altogether keep from us.”

This book is brutally honest, or at least, it reads as such. It can’t have been easy for Molly McCloskey to publicly confess to her long lasting indifference to her brother and the struggle he’s living, or to their parent’s inability to recognise that something is wrong. Still, it is the combination of almost clinical distance and heartbreaking detail that made this book both an intriguing and devastating read.

And yet, no matter how much it sometimes felt as if the author had distanced herself from the person and problem she was writing about, the book feels deeply personal. She doesn’t spare herself, doesn’t try to excuse her thoughts, feelings, and behaviours, and doesn’t hide from her own struggles with mental health issues. That wasn’t always easy to read, and there were times when it was very easy to actively dislike Molly, but underneath it all was her desperate need to discover what had happened to her brother, her family, her life, and that desire was so understandable that I found myself relating to the author more often than I wanted to criticize her.

“Anxiety is essentially the condition in which fear is fearing itself. (…)If alcoholism is the condition that keeps telling you that you don’t have it, anxiety is a state of mind that keeps reassuring you that you are in its grip.”

And I can’t deny that the book was filled with more than a few statements and insights that spoke to me, such as the one below.

“Hell, of course, is not other people. Other people are merely irritating. Hell is the unrelieved self.”

Only a few days ago I finished When Light is Like Water a book I was less impressed with than I’d expected to be based on all the positive blurbs I’d seen. Now that I’ve finished Circles Around the Sun I have to admit that Molly McCloskey is indeed very good with words. Her descriptions, be it of people or of places, are vivid and her writing flows. But, I also think I much prefer this non-fictional work over the novel. And that’s saying something because I’m not really a non-fiction reader.

In my review for When Light is Like Water I wondered how much of the story was auto-biographical. This book answers that question with a resounding: quite a bit. The escape to Ireland, to the marriage to an Irishman, the house at the foot of a mountain, and the journeys to Kosovo, and Africa are all occurrences in both Alice and Molly’s life. So despite Molly saying in an interview on Irish radio that the her novel contains a kernel of truth around which she constructed a fictional story, I’m inclined to think it may be a wee bit more than ‘just’ a kernel. But then again, as she says in Circles Around the Sun, our memories and our realities can’t always be trusted. Why wouldn’t the same be true for what we see as fact and fiction?

“AS WE SEE THE CONSTANT CIRCLES AROUND THE SUN WE KNOW THAT THERE IS A REASON FOR OUR SUFFERING IN LIFE.” – Mike

Related Review: When Light is Like Water