More than once she finds herself performing before large crowds, speaking on a subject in which she has no background or expected to sing a song some other Nora recorded, but this one has never heard before. Often she must look for herself online, read her social media accounts, in order to know who she is. But she knows nothing of the life she’s just entered. She always remembers her original life - her root life - so she always has that point of comparison. Others last only as long as a sentence: “In one life she only ate toast.” Suspense comes from the fact that Nora is dropped in midstream, with no preparation. Haig describes some of Nora’s provisional lives in detail. So Nora opens her first book.īy the end, she’ll have opened a great many more. Nora is initially reluctant - life is just what she didn’t want more of - but the librarian is firm. Matt Haig’s latest novel is dedicated to “all the health workers.
Only one book is an exception to this, “The Book of Regrets,” a volume so heavy and toxic it’s dangerous for Nora to read more than a few lines. She explains to Nora that every book on the shelves is a doorway into a different life. The librarian is very wise, as librarians tend to be.
Its facade replicates an ordinary library, shelves with books, but on an infinite scale. This structure occupies a magical space between life and death. In Haig’s book, the mechanism through which transmigration takes place is the Midnight Library of the title. “As she stared at Voltaire’s still and peaceful expression - that total absence of pain - there was an inescapable feeling brewing in the darkness. She had “always had the sense that she came from a long line of regrets and crushed hopes that seemed to echo in every generation.” In short order, in a life already littered with remorse, she loses both her job and her beloved cat, Voltaire. She’s estranged from her only living relative, an older brother, and also distant from her only close friend both emotionally and geographically.
Nora is a woman with many gifts and few accomplishments. Haig’s central character is 35-year-old Nora Seed. Into this ever-popular genre, Matt Haig’s “The Midnight Library” is a welcome addition. This deep desire for a different life, or for more lives than just the one, is at the heart of any number of stories - movies like “Groundhog Day,” “Sliding Doors” and “It’s a Wonderful Life” television shows like “Sliders” and “Quantum Leap” wonderful novels like Kate Atkinson’s “Life After Life,” Andrew Sean Greer’s “The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells,” Jo Walton’s “My Real Children” and many others. Few fantasies are more enduring than the idea that there might be a second chance at a life already lived, some sort of magical reset in which mistakes can be erased, regrets addressed, choices altered.
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