March 2024: The Midnight Library

Great Expectations

Coming from a background in video games development, I've developed a healthy skepticism of critics.

In gaming journalism, reviews of new releases are typically scored out of 10. While you would expect 5 to be the average, reviewers are reluctant to use the full range of numbers available, and won't score a game less than 7 unless it is genuinely offensive, broken, or both. As a result, it's understood by the gaming community that 7 is shorthand for average (or, heaven forbid, "mid"), and anything less than 7 is a disaster. It's a frustrating system, and results in anything that isn't groundbreaking being dismissed as merely fine, with no levels in between.

I hold this skepticism not just for games critics, but for critics of media in general. As such, the widespread critical acclaim for Matt Haig's The Midnight Library did little to endear it to me. It's a book I've been aware of since it was first published back in 2020, whether that was seeing it in the shops, reading about it on social media, or even hearing some of my friends who are big readers discuss and recommend it.

Even though I'd been told for years about how amazing the book is, I wasn't moved to give it a try myself. I've been burned before by rave reviews, and at the time the book came out, I wasn't even able to finish books that I was interested in reading, never mind ones that I was lukewarm on. But in March 2024, since I'd begun my effort to rekindle the passion I had for reading when I was younger (and because one of my beautiful friends gifted it to me for my birthday the year before), I decided to take the plunge.

Before we go any further, a quick word of caution: while this book is mostly a cozy read, it does explore some pretty heavy themes. A full list of trigger warnings for The Midnight Library can be found here. For this review specifically, please be aware of mentions of depression, existentialism, suicide, and suicide ideation.

A Library Far, Far Away

Nora Seed is 35 years old, living in Bedford, England, and deeply unhappy with her life. She grapples with regret over the choices she has made on a daily basis, believing that they have left her alienated from the people she loves and a failure in every field that she is passionate about.

When her cat is run over and killed, it's the last straw for Nora, and she attempts to take her own life. At the stroke of midnight, she wakes not in an afterlife, but in a magical library. Its shelves are filled with an infinite number of potential lives she could have lived, if she had chosen to stay in her band, or to pursue competitive swimming, or say yes to coffee with the cute guy who she sells guitars to.

The opportunity to escape her original life - referred to as her root life - is irresistible to Nora, and she happily explores these other realities. She is guided by Mrs Elm, a teacher that Nora had when she was younger who serves as the librarian in this magical limbo. But as Nora experiences the other lives she fantasised about, she begins to wonder which, if any, of those lives contain the path to the true happiness she desperately craves.

A Bit of Magic

There's a lot to like about The Midnight Library. In particular, I thoroughly enjoyed Matt Haig's writing style, which I found to be both approachable and thought provoking. Given the subject matter, Nora's thoughts tend to skew quite dark, especially early on, and it would be easy for the overall tone to be really dour. Or the pendulum could swing the other way, and Mrs Elm could talk in lofty hypotheticals about the wonders of life, and preach to Nora about how she shouldn't be so depressed. Instead, the emotional revelations that Nora experience in this book are presented gently, almost while placing a comforting hand on your shoulder.

My favourite quote was probably this one:

""It's difficult to predict, isn't it? The things that will make up happy.""p. 61

This was said by Mrs Elm to Nora, after she comes out of one of her potential other lives and finds that she didn't enjoy it as much as she thought she would. This quote stuck with me because I think there's a real honesty in it. We often do believe that the grass will be greener on the other side of the fence; that if we only had a different job, or were with a particular person, then everything would be better. But the reality of those circumstances is often very different from how we imagine it, and it might be even worse than where we were beforehand. What I particularly like about the way Mrs Elm breaks this to Nora is that she says it without judgement. There's no smugness in it, no "I told you so" attitude. It's simply a safe discussion between friends about how funny life can be sometimes. This cozy, almost quaint wrapping helps to make these philosophical revelations go down a bit smoother, and prevents them from coming across as overly sanctimonious.

I wrote about my love of urban fantasy in my review of The Dead Take the A Train, and how interesting I find the use of magic in an everyday 21st century setting. The Midnight Library is another example of a fantasy story in a modern world, but it's an example of magical realism rather than urban fantasy. The difference between the two subgenres is largely tonal; whereas urban fantasy stories like Buffy the Vampire Slayer or The Dead Take the A Train tend to be more adventurous and have some sort of magical conflict or adversary to overcome, the fantastical elements of magical realism are often more downplayed. The worlds are much more grounded and relatable, and magic is almost an incidental detail when compared to the overall themes. This is true of the magic system seen in The Midnight Library. The means of how Nora travels to her alternate lives pale in comparison to what she learns when she arrives in them.

The magical elements are grounded further by the excerpts from Nora's own writings that are scattered throughout the novel. The most common source of these musings are from her social media posts in her root life, but we also get to read things like song lyrics and poems that she's written in some of her alternate realities. These epistolary sections provide unfiltered insight into Nora's state of mind. They serve as a shorthand for showing that even though Nora has used magic to glimpse what a different version of her life might look like, that use of magic hasn't made that life better for her.

It's an interesting approach, and I don't think I've ever read a fantasy novel where the fantasy elements are this muted. But although I normally prefer urban fantasy where the marriage between the modern setting and the magic is more explicit, it works well here in The Midnight Library. This isn't a story about having the ability to travel the multiverse and experience other realities. It's a story about shifting perspectives - about how Nora's point of view changes when she lives those other realities. As Haig writes, aptly quoting Henry David Thoreau,

""It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.""p. 219

The "magic" in the story is merely a stand in for the work that needs to be done in order to gain this new worldview. One could even go so far as to say that the work, the process, the therapy, is the real magic.

Unfortunately, that brings me to the parts of The Midnight Library that I didn't like.

Is it a Wonderful Life?

To begin with, none of the wonderful quotes or epistolary sections or sprinkles of magical realism could distract me from the elephant in the room of The Midnight Library: as soon as Nora takes her own life and arrives in her version of limbo, it's clear exactly how the book is going to end. I was able to envision her waking up in her own reality just like Ebenezer Scrooge waking up on Christmas morning after a mere 30 pages.

That's not to say that I would have preferred if Nora had decided that she wanted to die after all - a novel that posits that suicide is a valid way out for people who are struggling would have been deeply upsetting to read, and harmful to put into the world. But I knew that wasn't how the book was going to end, and once I took that as fact, there was only one possible resolution to the plot. There was no tension for me while reading about Nora's journey, because I had already come to the conclusion that she would, and I did 250 pages before her.

A cynical reader could take a very nihilistic view of Nora's experience in the library. If it's not possible to be absolutely happy, then what's the point of the pursuit of happiness?

The twin spectres of A Christmas Carol and It's a Wonderful Life do haunt this book to a degree. All three stories share the same basic premise: an unhappy protagonist is shown visions of either their pasts or alternate realities regarding themselves, and are motivated by these visions to change how they lead their lives. Haig even subtly invokes It's a Wonderful Life in his version of the story; Nora lives in the real English town of Bedford, and It's a Wonderful Life is set in the fictional Bedford Falls, New York. In spite of this, I don't believe that The Midnight Library is derivative of either story beyond the same basic hook. But it's interesting to compare the ways these different texts approach that hook.

In A Christmas Carol, Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by the three Ghosts of Christmas. After reliving the loneliness and mistakes of his past, and seeing the cruelties he has unknowingly inflicted on his workers in the present, he is finally shown what awaits him in the future. The vision of him dying alone and unloved inspires him to turn over a new leaf, and he wakes up on Christmas morning with a newly thankful heart. He resolves to live a better life, and to have a positive impact on those around him, to shore up his legacy and avoid the ghastly fate shown to him by the ghosts. In It's a Wonderful Life, George Bailey, resentful that he never escaped the town of Bedford Falls, contemplates suicide. The angel Clarence comes to George's aid and shows him a reality in which he had never been born, where the people in George's life are much worse off than they are now, or have even died without him there to help them. Realising that all the sacrifices that he has made over the years haven't been for naught, George resolves to live, and returns to his own reality.

In both stories, the protagonists change their mindsets after they realise the impact that they've had on others. This lies in contrast with Nora's journey in The Midnight Library; her revelations are more individual. After seeing many potential variants of her life where she still hasn't achieved absolute happiness, she concludes that absolute happiness isn't achievable at all. The grass is just as green in her own reality as it is in all the alternatives she sees, and although that reality isn't perfect, it doesn't mean that she should stop living in it. As Nora writes in her life affirming social media post at the end of the novel:

""It is easy to regret the lives we aren't living... But it is not the lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself.""p. 277

This is a more nuanced message than the ones presented in A Christmas Carol and It's a Wonderful Life. Unlike Scrooge and George Bailey, who change after realising the effect they're having on the people around them, Nora changes after realising how her own mindset is affecting her. Instead of resolving to be kind to others, Nora resolves to be kinder to herself. That's a much more useful lesson to learn, and much closer to what healing from depression looks like in the real world.

A cynical reader, however, could take a very nihilistic view of Nora's experience in the library. She had an infinite number of possible lives to explore, and she wasn't able to find true contentment in any of them. If it's not possible to be absolutely happy, then what's the point of the pursuit of happiness? Are we destined to settle for "good enough", and must compensate for any deficit of joy by viewing our lives as half full instead of half empty? The Midnight Library presents this perspective shift as the cure to all of Nora's problems, but it veers dangerously close to suggesting that all she needed to do was to look on the bright side. To stop complaining. To stop being so depressed.

The Moral of the Story

When doing a bit of research about Haig for this review, I learned that he has actually written a few self help books about dealing with depression and anxiety, based on his own experience. That added context helped me to make sense of why I came out of The Midnight Library feeling talked down to. There's a certain smugness to the aesop of the novel that reminds me of the moralising of self help books and wellness guides. They often read as if the author has unlocked the singular secret to being happy, and is descending like Prometheus to bestow its fire upon us mortals.

The same smug energy permeates the message of The Midnight Library. You're supposed to come out of the book feeling the same as Nora when she returns to her original life. You're supposed to look around at your own circumstances and realise that maybe they aren't as bad as you thought they were. And I didn't. This assertion that all you need to cure your depression is to look at your life from a different angle is one that I found to be laughably juvenile.

It's frustrating for me to have to come to this conclusion, because there was a lot about this book I enjoyed. And I know that, given his own struggles with depression, Haig's intention is not to alienate readers with his divine knowledge. This novel is an earnest attempt to help people, and it's genuinely thoughtful, nuanced, and well written. I'm sure that there are many who read this book and felt the comfort that it's trying to provide. And on the micro level, I can see how you could be comforted. I won't deny that the warm embrace of Haig's prose struck a chord with me. But on the macro level, the wider moral of the story didn't leave me comforted. It left me patronized. Despite everything it has going for it, overall I found The Midnight Library to border on condescending in a way I didn't appreciate.

That said, perhaps my perspective on this book is closer to Nora's new outlook than I think. As much as the aesop left me unmoved, I still hold The Midnight Library in high regard. I certainly don't see it as perfect, but it's far from a bad book - in many ways, I found it brilliant. My three star rating is down to personal grievances more than anything.

A less jaded reader will likely feel the warmth and uplift that it's going for, and I hope that they do. As for me, I'll think about pencilling in a meeting with the three Ghosts of Christmas before revisiting this book in the future. Perhaps then my thoughts will be more hopeful and less humbug.