The Midnight Library – Matt Haig

Look at that, I read another one of these!

I didn’t love the previous book I read by Matt Haig. But although I read The Humans first, it was actually The Midnight Library that had originally been recommended to me, and so I felt obliged to give it a shot.

It doesn’t take long for people to get overwhelmed by life and wonder what it would be like if things had shaken out differently. I remember thinking such thoughts way back in my teens, and working with adolescents I have heard them say similar things. It starts about as soon as you fuck something up in life, which is usually pretty early. The line of reasoning is so common that I tend to think of it as its own genre, with titles such as the The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, Replay, and Dark Matter touching on this theme in vastly different ways. Those are all books I have enjoyed, and so it might be a genre I just take to.

But where Haig’s book stands out is how upfront the story is about the existential anxiety that generated it. It is the same existential anxiety that one feels reading The Humans. The Novel opens with the protagonist considering all the things she might have done with her life, and the regrets of not following those paths. After a suicide attempt, she finds her self at a certain crossroads of existence, where she is allowed to try on the lives that would have happened should she have made different choices in life. As one can imagine, none of those lives are without there own problems. It creates a bit of a morality tale feeling to the story that I didn’t love.

It’s weird that Matt Haig seems to want to beat you, hamfistedly, with a point that is vague and not all that well articulated.

Reading this was a strange experience. I remember certain details of it more memorably than I remember the resolution of the story. But of course, as with other stories that are a little bit moralistic in their telling, one can imagine pretty easily how the story well end. But we don’t exactly read things like this for their endings, we read them in order to explore our own angst with life. But as with self-help books, the simplified nature of narratives like this will never map onto our own lives in such a way as to produce real answers. That doesn’t make this a bad book, but one must then look at it for other reasons. And for me at least, it was largely an enjoyable narrative. At least it was more enjoyable than The Humans, but that is a low bar to clear.

Stylistically and thematically, The Midnight Library did feel similar to The Humans. From looking at the title of Haig’s other books there is a sinking feeling that he might be delivering the same things over and over again with his books, and I don’t feel like I will be reading any more of them.