The Midnight Library by Matt Haig is one of those books which generated a lot of good publicity when it was first published. Book reviewers and bloggers appeared to like it and it won awards voted for by readers. I was, therefore, quite pleased when it turned up in my monthly second-hand book subscription package a year or so ago. I am glad that I have finally got to read it, albeit a few years after everyone else.
Nora Seed’s life is not going well. She has lost her job, her cat is dead, her relationship is over and she sees no hope for the future. She decides to end her own life but, after swallowing the pills, she finds herself in an enormous library containing an infinite number of books with a familiar looking librarian. Each book contains a different life to the one that Nora has lived, reflecting different decisions she might have made. Nora has the opportunity to try these different lives and to find one that she prefers to the reality she has just left.
This is an interesting idea, although not wholly original, and we follow Nora as she experiences the different versions of reality that she might have had, if she had made different decisions. Along the way Nora discovers that it isn’t about the choices she made but about her attitude to people and to failure. The life that she eventually chooses seems inevitable to me from the beginning of the story but we have to share the process with Nora and watch her learn.
I have to say that I found this book disappointing. I thought that it was really obvious what would happen in the end and so I wasn’t invested in these new lives that Nora experiences. I think that her awkwardness in being thrust into new situations, for which she is not prepared, is supposed to be amusing but after the first couple of times she tried a new life I found it rather wearing. I wish that I could have generated more enthusiasm for a book that is much loved but I found it all rather obvious.
The other issue that I had with this story was that the author seems to equate clinical depression with sadness. If Nora’s life changes and she is happier then the depression, which remember has driven her to suicide, will disappear. This seems to me like dangerous messaging and rather close to the idea that people with depression can just snap out of it with a adopt a more positive outlook on life – it really doesn’t work that way.
I am glad that I read this book but I didn’t really enjoy it. Maybe I am not the best reader for this story. I shall pass it on to Oxfam as it is in good condition.
Anne Is Reading 