I had not heard of Matt Haig, and don’t know that I would ever have come across his novel ‘The Midnight Library’ if it hadn’t been next month’s reading group choice. I might perhaps have picked it up in a charity shop or church bookstall, as the cover is quite appealing and the blurb on the back intriguing, but that’s the case of many books and I’m trying not to have more than two shelves of ‘to-be-read’ books. 
(Amazon UK link)
However, since the book was on the list, I bought it from the Awesome Books site when I was in the UK earlier in the year, and have been reading it over the past few days. Overall, I liked it very much.
The main protagonist is a young woman called Nora. We meet her in a prologue when she’s eleven, taking refuge in her school library with a friendly, motherly librarian called Mrs Elm. At the end of the prologue there’s evidently some bad news, but we don’t learn what it was until much later in the book.
The action then switches to the day before Nora decides she wants to die… the heading of the section tells us this. And it’s rather a depressing incident, too. It’s not surprising that Nora feels low. And the following day is worse… one thing after another goes wrong. She starts wishing her life were different, and by midnight is convinced that she’s a waste of space: that nobody will miss her if she dies, and that she can’t take any more misery.
Action then moves to what appears to be a huge library, with Mrs Elm in charge, little changed from Nora’s memory of nearly two decades earlier. However this library, it turns out, is not a normal one: it’s a kind of interim place, where Nora can choose to relive part of her life as it would have happened if she had made a different decision at some point. There are philosophical discussions about infinite universes, in an almost Pratchett-like way; there’s also a heavy tome, the ‘book of regrets’, that lists all the things Nora wishes she had done differently.
Nora tries on a series of different lives, some of which turn out to be much worse than the one she had been living, but she has a lot of different experiences as she explores what might have happened if, for instance, she had not given up competitive swimming, or if she had followed an idle dream to study glaciers, or if she had remained in a band she and her brother were part of as teenagers.
It wasn’t hard to see where the book was going to go, and I had more-or-less worked out how it would end by about half-way through. But the writing is engaging, the situations diverse and intriguing. One of the bylines on the front of the book says that it’s ‘filled with warmth and humour’, and while I didn’t feel that there was a lot of humour in the book, it was a warm, satisfying read. Nora is a likeable person, who didn’t have a happy family life as a child; so it’s encouraging to see how her regrets gradually diminished as she realised that the choices she made weren’t, on the whole, so bad after all.
It’s a book with a message (‘agenda’ is probably too strong although it’s the first word I thought of) in that it makes that point that many of the choices we now regret may in fact have led to a much better outcome than those we rejected. But it’s couched in such gentle terms, shown rather than explained, and with the delightfully surreal ‘midnight library’ as a regular stopping place, that I felt encouraged and inspired rather than being irritated by its obvious underlying message.
All in all I liked the book very much, and look forward to discussing it with others who have read it.
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