Book Review – Matt Haig – The Midnight Library 2020
- arthurpeterchappell
- Jan 9
- 5 min read
Updated: Feb 10
Spoilers
The first book read for the new Vinyl Tap pub’s book club group and an interesting, quite readable if flawed choice.
A multiverse series of seemingly infinite second chances for a young woman who has attempted to commit suicide, with influences from It’s A Wonderful Life, Quantum Leap and Groundhog Day.
After a cascade flow of things going wrong, peaking with the death of her cat, Voltaire, Nora Seed commits suicide, but to her amazement, she doesn’t cease to exist or find a conventional religion rooted afterlife. She winds up in a strange library, containing nothing but different lives she could have lived with different choices and decisions. What if she had carried on working in the pub? What if she had taken her swimming ability to the point at which she became an Olympic Champion? What if she had pursued a career in glaciology? What if she had become a famous singer/composer? What if?
It soon becomes apparent that each alternate life will go wrong or prove unsatisfactory, causing Nora to bounce back to the library to pick another book/life.
I thought even from the first book she goes into that this was going to have a grass always seems greener on the other side but there’s no place like home conclusion leading to Nora surviving and going on with the life she tried to end with that being the best choice all along, and sure enough that is where the work goes.
The main problem for me is how easily Nora rejects most alternatives the first time something fails to work out. Each death/rejection and library rebound feels like a fresh suicide and Nora seems to naively assume life needs to be totally free of conflict, disappointments and things going badly. Also, when she does return to where she left off from her root life, everything goes happy ever after. We never see how she copes with the next catastrophe to befall her (and life is impossible to live without them).
Haig has had depression issues in his life, but here, the answers seem too easy. Most of us don’t get fresh chances, and there is not an instant acceptance and better understanding from the people round us when we come back from the brink of self-destruction. Nora’s ending seems more fairy tale joy than a realistic challenge ahead of her. I don’t think having her return to find her life miserable would have been right, but the bliss that dominates the ending seems too fairy tale for a credible allegory of our times. Nora should at least see some challenges and conflicts ahead as well as the potential joys to come.
Nora is guided to the best books of her life to choose by a facsimile of a friendly, now ageing school librarian she knew in her youth, Mrs Elm, who explains library rules and helps choose the books for Nora to literally plunge into next.
It’s an easy fun read, but takes its premise far too lightly. Most suicides don’t get a second chance, let alone an infinite series of alternate timelines to try out. Nora briefly meets another time/alternate lives surfer, Hugo, but he isn’t referred to much after his chapter in which he has come to simply enjoy the journeying. Nora by contrast, can’t do that, as it saturates her and feels alien to her. She finds other lives that feel increasingly like being in someone else’s life, not her own.
A disadvantage Nora has on arriving in each new timeline is not knowing her back story. She sees where she is but not how she got there. She is expected to give a major speech without knowing what to say, (the body she has hopped in would have done). In some ways, not knowing who some people are or remembering which songs she wrote or didn’t causes confusion and conflict with her friends who think she has a health condition involving amnesia or early onset dementia. Her friends distance themselves due to her alienation.
Nora flashes through a multitude of lives in a rapid montage chapter echoing Hugo’s intentional way to travel the lifelines. She says that in some she has children. In others not but this does not make anything of the impact motherhood has on her. Later, when she has a daughter called Molly who she does connect to (affecting her choices as to whether to stay in or leave the time line that seems the happiest alternative to her root life), it is treated like Molly is her first and only experience of parenting. Her first experience of this ought to have more weight than the author gives it.
Nora is fascinated by the American Transcendentalism school philosopher, Henry David Thoreau, but his work isn’t about exploring infinite choices and alternatives. He is best known for Walden, a fascinating book in which he purposely retreated to a hermit lifestyle in an isolated woodland camp (near Walden Ponds, in Massachusetts), and chronicled his two year life of calm, stillness and isolation. It’s a quite profound, near mystical study of someone escaping the rat race (at one point he was arrested for not paying his taxes), and he clearly enjoys the self-sufficiency and isolation. It’s a celebration of the simple life, and freedom from material desires. Nora, by contrast, is a social animal, trying to fit in, find acceptance, and belong. Thoreau might well have agreed with Haig/Nora’s reflection that life is not to be understood, just lived, but not much more.
Nora, in her root life, lives in Bedford, Bedfordshire, a town she detests and treats as dreadful but I stayed in Bedford for a weekend in 2025, and I thought it was a lovely town. Oddly, though the town is strongly linked to author John Bunyan, who lived there, and whose Pilgrim’s Progress novel more echoes Nora’s search for answers than Thoreau's attempt to bi-pass the need for any.
A well chosen accessible, thoughtful book with which to launch the book club. Interestingly all the attendees agreed that the book is not on our favourires, or must read again some day lists. Huge thanks to the members, and especially Millie Angel, who started and co-ordinates events.
Photos taken by me.
Links – My Trip to Bedford https://arthurchappell.wordpress.com/2025/06/23/weekend-in-bedford-bedfordshire-june-20th-to-22nd-2025/
Free audio recording – The full text of Thoreau’s Walden. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VaME4iHUhSE
If you like my writings and you would like to see more, you can help fund my activity with a modest donation or two to my new Buymeacoffee Donations Page https://buymeacoffee.com/arthurchappell?new=1
Arthur Chappell
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