The Midnight Library by Matt Haig — review
Seán Maigh
Ten million copies. Matt Haig’s novel was an instant bestseller, won the Goodreads Choice Award for Fiction and spent fifty-two weeks on the New York Times bestseller list on its way to sales of over ten million worldwide. Numbers like that don’t describe a book so much as a weather front. The question for the sceptical reader is whether the novel underneath the phenomenon deserves the fuss. The answer, on this desk’s reading: partly.
Published by Canongate in August 2020, it follows Nora Seed, a thirty-something woman regretful about her life, who feels alienated and unneeded in this world. After she attempts to end her life, she finds herself in the Midnight Library, a place between life and death where she has the chance to undo her regrets and experience other versions of her life, presided over by Mrs Elm, her old school librarian. There is an entire book of Nora’s regrets, too painful to read for very long, and shelves of alternative existences to try on for size. The catch, inevitably, is that each alternate life turns out to have its own worries and complications.
Haig writes this from lived ground. He has spoken publicly about his struggles with mental health, and depression led him to attempt to take his own life at twenty-four — the crisis behind his memoir Reasons to Stay Alive, a number-one bestseller that stayed in the British top ten for forty-six weeks. He is also the author of How to Stop Time, The Humans and The Radleys, and the audiobook here is read by Carey Mulligan. This is not a writer tourist-visiting despair, and the book is the better for it.
And the premise is genuinely fun. The parlour game of multiple lives — which one would you order, given the menu? — is irresistible, and hardly untested: the 1970s television series Fantasy Island spun an entire run out of precisely this wish-fulfilment. Nor could the timing be better. In the age of InstaTok, when everyone else’s existence scrolls past looking totes amazeballs, the ‘what if’ itch is practically a national condition. Haig scratches it, agreeably.
He also makes the scratching painless. The chapters are short and snipped — some barely longer than a meme — and the pages turn themselves, the way chocolate digestives disappear from the packet: one more, then one more. That is craft of a kind, and commuters will be grateful for it.
What grates is the homework on display. The book name-drops a parade of great philosophers, and each citation reads less like thinking than like a hand shooting up at the back of the class: hey reader, look, I’ve done the reading. But quoting a philosopher and philosophising are different sports, and the novel keeps mistaking the first for the second.
This desk is not alone in the reservation. NPR’s Jason Sheehan judged the novel a little too gentle and straightforward. Others were warmer: in the New York Times Book Review, Karen Joy Fowler called it “a welcome addition” to the genre and found that Nora “remains good company”. Both camps have a point, which is roughly where the truth sits.
Because if there is a secret to life, it is surely not the absence of regrets but the learning from them — life being not what it has been, but what is to come. The Midnight Library gestures pleasantly at that truth without ever quite earning it. So enjoy it: it is a fun read, briskly told, kindly meant. But when you finish and want to get properly existential, walk into a real, daytime library and thumb through Descartes or Sartre — the originals, not the name-drops. Life’s too short. Luckily, so is this book.