The Midnight Library

Content Warning: This novel and review discuss animal death, death, and suicide. 

“Strange” is a word that cannot loosely be applied to Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library. In fact, it is a word better tied to the book itself—from the concept to the opening pages, the story creates a dreamlike feeling that captures the imaginations of readers who are fluent in genres typically defined as “strange.” But this contemporary fantasy world is not one most people really want to find themselves immersed in. Why?

Because the Midnight Library is a place between life and death. Filled with endless rows of books, the contents within them are not for the faint of heart. 

Nora Seed, the protagonist of Haig’s novel, is unhappy with her life. She gave up professional swimming when she was young, as well as the chance to be in her brother’s band, and she ended her relationship with her fiance right before their wedding, effectively isolating herself and jeopardizing her career.

As the novel begins, her isolation and despair only escalate. Her cat is hit by a car, and after she arrives late for her job at String Theory, her boss, Neil, fires her. To make matters worse, she misses her appointment to teach piano to her only pupil and loses the opportunity to continue teaching him as a result. The last straw, so to speak, comes with the realization that her elderly neighbor has found someone else to get his medicine for him; in Chapter 6, Nora reflects, “That was it. No one needed her. She was superfluous to the universe” (20).

Haig begins each one of the opening sections with a countdown, starting with “Nineteen years before she decided to die” (1) in the Prologue and ending with “Two hours before she decided to die” (21) in Chapter 6, at which point Nora writes a suicide note and promptly overdoses on pills and alcohol. This storytelling technique builds anticipation and drives the story forward, adding emphasis to the number the protagonist finds on her watch when she awakes, which also happens to be the title of Chapter 7: 00:00:00 (24).

At exactly midnight, Nora finds herself in the Midnight Library, where she meets someone who resembles the old librarian she knew in her youth, Mrs. Elm. In Chapter 9, the librarian explains that Nora is in a place between life and death, where she has the opportunity to “try another life she could have lived. To see how things would be different if [she] had made other choices” (29). In other words, by opening the books in the library, Nora gets to step into different versions of her life. If she decides one of those lives is worth living for, then she can have it—but if she doesn’t choose a life at all, she will die, and the Midnight Library will cease to exist.

The majority of the book follows Nora as she explores the different lives she could have had if she had made different choices, but after each experience, she chooses to return to the library and converse with Mrs. Elm. While Nora struggles with the despair growing inside of her, she does change a little with each experience. In Chapter 17, after one particularly agitating book in which she revisits the death of her cat, Nora asks Mrs. Elm, “You could have just told me I wasn’t a bad cat owner. Why didn’t you?” Mrs. Elm replies, “Because, Nora, sometimes the only way to learn is to live” (67). The wisdom Mrs. Elm encourages Nora and readers alike to focus on what they can take away from their experiences rather than reflecting on all the things that went wrong or what could have gone “right.” Each book, then, is a lesson Nora needs to learn, in much the same way that the past, present, and future contained lessons that Scrooge, in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, needed to learn in order to become a better person.

Nora’s problem, then, is not her life as it is in the present or the choices she made in the past but her perspective of herself and her situation. The books in the library allow her to see many different versions of her life—some that she thinks she wants but hasn’t earned, and others that didn’t turn out the way she imagined—but not all of them are well-developed or clearly with purpose.

The book is less than 300 pages, and yet, at times, it feels like a long read. Some of Nora’s lives are visited in list form, such as in Chapter 51, when she quickly reflects, “In one life she ran the showbiz column [...] In one life she was an aid worker [...] In one life she taught music” (213). The page quickly describes 20 different lives Nora could have lived, and in this way, it shows readers how quickly Nora flips through them. However, the more disengaged the protagonist feels, the more disengaged the reader tends to be, if only because this method is extended throughout the chapter and not just on a single page. This disengagement deepens the depressing themes the novel conveys, and the little ray of sunshine in the otherwise overwhelming dark of Nora’s despair doesn’t really come until the end of the story, when there has already been so much darkness for the protagonist (and readers) to trudge through.

Individuals who have struggled or are currently struggling with depression and mental health may find this book triggering at times, especially those who have experienced the loss of loved ones, both human and animal alike. In the beginning of the book, Nora is not overwhelmed with despair at the loss of her cat but with envy that it is dead and she is not. This detail alone could be off-putting enough to turn certain audience members away. However, the writing in the book is beautiful in technique and powerful in content, and there are meaningful messages worth taking away—messages that could easily make readers a fan of Haig’s work for life.

Ultimately, the book is worth the read, but once readers follow through with Nora’s journey, they may find themselves content to leave the book on a shelf in their own library—if not for a second read, then at least for a second pair of eyes.