The Midnight Library Book Review | October 2020

 

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

I’m an avid follower of Matt Haig, both his fictional works and his social media (both are worth following). Trigger warnings for this novel there is a lot of exposure to mental health issues; specifically overdose. This novel follows Nora Seed, she feels hopeless, worthless and like she has no future. She is living in a dead-end town, stuck in a dead-end job, and feel incredibly lonely since all the relationships she once had have ceased to exist. Most importantly, the relationship she had with herself is no longer there, she simply doesn’t care for herself or for her life anymore. The death of her best friend and animal, Volts (named after Voltaire) sends her in to a deeper hole of depression. Subsequently, this sends Nora in to a spiral of depression and she ends up taking an overdose.

Paradise for Bookworms

This is where the magical realism of the novel comes to life. Haig presents ‘The Midnight Library’ as the liminal space between life and death. This is where the name of the novel comes from; Nora takes an overdose at midnight, and she is now stuck within a massive library with her primary school teacher, Mrs Elm. I love the descriptive, yet simple language in the book: ‘between life and death there is a library, she said. And within that library, the shelves go on forever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived’ (p.29). This sounds like a bookworm’s paradise with inevitable shelves.

Her mentor, Mrs Elm helps her to realise that you can have any life you want, if you just believe you can have it. The Book of Regrets is where they start, working their way through the regrets of never going in to competitive swimming, pursuing the band she had with her brother, lecturing philosophy and becoming a glaciologist. Nora travels to these lives and gets to play out her life and if she decides she doesn’t like this life that she planned for herself; she fades back in to the Midnight Library. There aren’t an inevitable amount of times that she can go in to other lives; time will run out, that is the ultimatum. This is her choice to live or die.

Happiness is a virtue

The one recurring theme is the constant longing to be happy. In one life, which as a reader I thought Nora was going to stay was when she was a successful lecturer of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. She had an amazing husband and a lovely daughter; not forgetting the dog. But that wasn’t the life she ended up in. She went back in to the Midnight Library, and chose the life she was in before. She didn’t choose the lives that she may have gotten, she chose to live the original one. Most importantly she chose to be ALIVE.

 The one thing that the novel focuses on is that EVERYONE at some time in their lives wishes they did that, or went there; essentially wishing their lives away. But I think the magic of this book is to make the most of the life that you are living. It is easy in this day and age we compare ourselves to people’s lives on social media; which is often a facade. By the end of the novel, Nora returns back to her old life, the Nora who tried to commit suicide. The story builds itself around how the positive thoughts that Nora didn’t have in the previous life; she has now. Her life changes, her brother comes back in to her life, she has hope about her future even though she may have lost her job. Her life changes because of the thought of her dying, and all of her regrets are put behind her; maybe she will be able to live our her regrets with her new philosophy of life.

Especially during these hard times, literature can provide a really important distraction and inspiration to us. Matt Haig’s writing offers hope and inspiration to those that are going through hard times and the struggles of suffering from mental health.

Happy Reading! 

Rose x