Every choice you make makes you
The premise is simple: Nora Seed wants to die. Where demise is often laid out at the closing length of a literary piece, this is where we begin. The Midnight Library by Matt Haig starts with a young woman on the brink of making an irrevocable decision. Nora has lost her job, she has fallen out with her best friend, estranged from her brother. Her relationships are in tatters and her sole interaction of comfort; her cat Voltaire, is dead.
But above all, Nora is just deeply, deeply sad. So sad, in fact, that she cannot imagine going on for even one more day. Living for her, has become nothing but an arduous, unnecessary chore. And so, she ends it. Sitting in her home, her grief compounded beyond restraint, she overdoses on antidepressants and the world goes black.
Nora then wakes up in a library. Not heaven, not hell, not even a stylised limbo. The Midnight Library, is stated to be the place that people go when they find themselves hanging precariously between life and death, particularly when they are not entirely sure about which way to ultimately end up (cue the foreboding).
The library is gargantuan. Shelves stretching out as far as the eye can see, possibly infinite. Filled with books of different widths, the spiritual bibliotheque is governed, curiously enough by, Nora's school librarian, Mrs. Elm.
"Every life, contains many millions of decisions," Mrs Elm says to Nora. Some decisions are big, some are small but every time a decision is made, it takes over millions of others, cementing forever more the trajectory of your life from that point on. Choosing coffee over tea that one Monday morning, not packing an umbrella because it was sunny out, to telling your dad how much you loved him while he sat there reading his book in the den or hanging out with that one person who gave you that vibe one time. A spectrum of decisions with varying consequences. The books in the Midnight Library it turns out are portals to all the lives you could be living. You just have to choose the one you want and open it. Yes, it really is that simple. And yes, it really is presented that plainly.
As a destination in and of itself, the Midnight Library is a 101-level lecture in parallel universe theory, philosophy and quantum indeterminacy. Think of it as a therapist simulator, minus the couch and the hourly fee. It stirs within the reader sentiments within the ballpark of regret but also, feelings of possibility. Let’s be honest, who among us has not engaged in that innocent daydream; a moment of silence at work or lying awake in bed at night, finding your mind wander, wondering what your life would have been like…if only you had one that one thing differently that one time.
Nora Seed certainly has. More so than the average person for sure. We find her wracked with regret. How would her life be if she had married her fiancé rather than walking out on him two days before their wedding? What would have happened if she had stuck with the band, she and her brother and their friend Ravi had started rather than bailing just when they were about to get big? What would have happened if she had stuck with competitive swimming, been a better cat owner, been nicer to her parents, followed her best friend to Australia or become a glaciologist? Yes. The questions are that simple. And again, yes, they're presented that plainly.
Fortunately for her, the Midnight Library is the place where Nora gets to find all of these out. Where, for an hour, a day or a month, she gets to dive into and sample lives where she made these different choices, with the ultimate goal of scratching out those regrets and finding a life that she is truly comfortable with.
It must be acknowledged how Matt Haig presents all of this in a straight line. 'The Midnight Library' does not operate on controlled chaos but rather chooses to follow a plot with no twists or turns. It is to no surprise then, that reading the book feels like a gentle glide.
The mechanics of the library itself are simple enough to follow, courtesy of Mrs Elm's who presents everything to Nora very directly. Infinite options are at her disposal, but not an infinite amount of time to choose. Infinite possibilities are present within every book, but she can only sample them one at a time. When Nora loses hope, the foundation of the library starts to crumble and collapse but when she finds herself excited again about living, things appear solid. The conception of the library as the kaleidoscope through which different lives can be accessed is sure to please readers and has the advantage of being both spiritually magical and factually grounded. For those who happen to frequent them often, every library is a liminal space; the Midnight Library is different in scale but not alien. And a vision of limitless possibility, of new roads taken, of new lives lived, of a whole different world available to us somehow, somewhere, might be exactly the cathartic procrastination that we all collectively need in these uncertain and troubling times.
One would wonder how something so poignant and nuanced can be articulated with such deliberate ease and unpretentious informality. But it seems that sometimes, simplicity is the best way forward. The craftmanship of narrative is so smooth that it seems almost that the decision to keep it simple to a fault was a deliberate choice on the part of the author and not an accident. In a world slowly drowning in multiverse possibilities, Nora acts like a proxy to all of us, musing at the situation discussing the pop-science implications of a multi-dimensional existence.
“[She] had read about multiverses and knew a bit about Gestalt psychology. About how human brains take complex information about the world and simplify it, so that when a human looks at a tree it translates the intricately complex mass of leaves and branches into this thing called 'tree'. To be human was to continually dumb down the world into an understandable story that keeps things simple. She knew that everything humans see is a simplification. A human sees the world in three dimensions. That is a simplification. Humans are fundamentally limited, generalising creatures, living on auto-pilot, who straighten out curved streets in their minds, which explains why they get lost all the time.”
Haig comments on this generously throughout his book, taking the common ‘what if’ trope, potentially a dark or sad or curvy or weird spin through the logical and philosophical possibilities of regret crossed with multiverse theory and straightens it out. There is tragedy of course but what life is there that doesn’t possess it? Is tragedy the only reason we consider the existence of infinite chances? But what about the growth? The evolution of the psyche that only tragedy can shape. These ‘soft meditations’ on the cost of fame and the dignity of smaller lives, lots of quotes from philosophers (because that's what Nora studied in school), and quiet thoughts about the weight of meaning in a universe where everything that can happen, does.
Moving on now from all its profound possibilities to its various impediments, the protagonist Nora Seed is by far the most humdrum element of the book. As a character, it gets cumbersome very quickly about how much Nora as a character doesn’t really truly want anything. Sure, she can wax poetically over how much a regret in her life is making her miserable - so profoundly in fact that she doesn’t want to continue living. But upon the realisation of stepping into one of the books, it is astounding how quickly her ‘dream state’ begins to unravel. A resounding ‘meh’ can be heard compromising the curiosity of the reader and instead replacing it with irritation. So, while Haig writes about one of the most universal and easily identifiable sentiments governing human emotion, doing so through a character who seems to actively want nothing is ultimately a very difficult character to identify with.
As a reader it does become somewhat difficult to keep your energy invested in a depressed and somewhat listless character, but Nora is not without her handful of virtues; she is smart (don’t mistake with sensibility) and observant, meticulously so; she remains good company, benign if you will. Her aforementioned penchant for philosophy and particular affection for the American Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau can be observed at several points making the book all the more potent, with the inclusion of several of his quotes: “Go confidently in the direction of your dreams” and “I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.”
Not to be confused as a self-help book cleverly disguised as a novel Haig gives those of us following along with Nora, a straightforward path from suicide to closure, from regret to acceptance. He presents us with a tree and the story is actively punctuated by choices and their consequences. As our primary window through this book, Nora lives a hundred lives, then a thousand. Enough of a ‘portion of an infinity’ that we just want her to choose one already.
At just the right moment, not too soon and not too late, Nora makes her final decisive move, taking us into the last section of the book. The ending is satisfying but not surprising. By the time it comes, in fact, only one choice still seems possible. The only question that remains for you to find out is which one will Nora finally choose. Hopefully, even within a multiverse of infinite choice and infinite possibility, I hope you stay with it long enough to find out.