I was driving around Kilkenny when I heard
a chap being interviewed on Ireland’s RTE Radio 1 about his latest novel. I
couldn’t quite follow what the book was about but the British author seemed
humbled by the runaway success of this latest book and was stoic about his
writing career of more than twenty titles. I memorised the title of this latest
book and the name of the author, determined to get hold of it at the first
opportunity, also noting The Humans which
one listener texted in as their favourite of Haig’s previous works.
A couple of days later I found myself
Googling Midnight Rider by author
xxx. As usual, I had only remembered one word – Midnight. After running for a
while down a rabbit hole of early 70s rock music, I rediscovered the actual
title and author. Then, breaking our house Covid-19 lockdown rules of ordering
locally, I bought it on Amazon UK as it was amazingly cheap at £5.00. I told
myself I wanted to test the post-Brexit function of importing goods from the UK
to the EU, but it was really because I’m tight-fisted. While I was in mean
mode, I added The Humans to the
basket.
The first piece of good news is Brexit hasn’t
impacted on Amazon UK book delivery in Ireland. Six days later the package
arrived with no extra taxes or charges. The second piece of good news was the
cover looked like a light and easy read. It turned out to be speculative
fiction (yes, I discovered the term on the internet after reading) and was an
enjoyable read. Unfortunately, Matt Haig’s style is so light and humorous that
I devoured The Midnight Library in
two days and was left wanting more. Like a delicious bottle of wine that you
know you should savour but can’t help guzzling and regret not having made it
last. And there we have it. Regret. That’s what The Midnight Library is all about, and the main character’s journey
towards the title of this review. I won’t get any closer to a spoiler than
that.
Parallel universes and alternative
realities make for some good books, and this is one of them. Haig’s
finger-light touch and gentle humour contrast strongly with other titles that
my mind dredged up – Cloud Atlas by
David Mitchell, The Time Traveler’s Wife by
Audrey Niffenegger – but The Midnight
Library compares very favourably. It allows audience participation. We all
have regrets about decisions taken and not taken during our lives, those what if moments when our futures may
have followed a very different path. The
Midnight Library is all about this. In fact, The Midnight Library is solely about this.
Nora is the main character, whose viewpoint
we follow throughout the book. My mind immediately cast the lead singer of the post-punk
band Dry Cleaning in this role. With a hypnotic drone of self-obsessed streams
of consciousness (“I've come to join your knitting circle … It's
a Rio de Janiero bouncy ball … Why don't you want oven chips now?”
– from Scratchcard Lanyard) and a
touch of suggested depression, Dry Cleaning’s singer and Nora became
inseparable in my mind. Anyway. Back to the regrets.
I regret not studying harder for my
A-levels, but then I would probably not have met my (current) wife, had two
beautiful children in Switzerland and ended up happy together in Ireland. I
regret having married my first wife, but then probably wouldn’t have had my
beautiful daughter from that marriage. I regret investing in Irish banks before
the global financial crisis and losing the equivalent of a brand new family car
in the crash, but then we probably would have invested in a second home and
lost even more. This is how it goes. In an alternative or parallel reality,
decisions changed lead to different outcomes. Nora, through a personal crisis,
very quickly gets into an enviable position of being able to choose and
experience these parallel universes and that’s the premise of The Midnight Library.
String theory and quantum physics,
multiverses and all that, I don’t quite buy it myself. Perhaps it’s because I
can’t grasp the concept. During the time of reading this book, we watched a
film called Blinded by the Light
about a Pakistani boy growing up in Luton, Bedfordshire, UK during the late
1980s. It fascinated me, as that was where I had grown up a decade earlier. I
watched the characters in Luton Sixth Form College, and regretted not having
gone there instead of the small sixth form of my Catholic school, where I well
and truly screwed up my education, at least for a while. Regret is like a
living dream with endless re-runs, some of them heart-breaking and others trite.
Why didn’t I stay in closer contact with my good friend Pino in Switzerland,
only finding out on facebook that he had inexplicably passed away? Why didn’t I
keep my mouth shut outside that pub in Luton (where I subsequently met my first
wife) and avoid getting my front tooth knocked out and having a bridging crown
at the front of my mouth for the rest of my life? I don’t believe there are
multiverses, alternative realities existing where I and everyone else have made
an infinity of different decisions. But it’s sometimes a good use of time to
muse upon them. Because then we retrospectively appreciate our mistakes and can
give ourselves credit for the good decisions we’ve made and the luck we have
enjoyed.
The
Midnight Library is a quick and easy read. Haig’s
style is light and entertaining, although often dealing with heavy subjects. At
no point did I want to put this book down because I’d had enough. In fact, I
would happily have read an infinite number of pages of further alternative futures
for Nora. Like one of the other travellers Nora meets, I think I might happily
continue to slide between lives. The emotional vertigo that Nora experiences
when she lands in the midst of an alternative reality is handled very well by
the author, and I wonder if I could really cope with that.
No, I don’t regret anything. I’m going to
stay in this life I have.