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Book: 'The Midnight Library'

Author: Matt Haig

Genre: Novel, science fiction

Rating (1 to 6): 5

"Who are we? Where do we come from and where are we going?" These are the eternal human questions. What is beyond us? What is the meaning of life?" is how I began my short piece for the Midnight Library in December, and I can't think of a more appropriate intro.

Matt Haig's book is not just a pleasant romance about the mistakes in a woman's life and her attempts to correct them. She presents this to you using time and space travel techniques, quotes from various schools of philosophy, quotes from classic hit pieces of music and makes you think not just about the life of a person but about Life in general. About the power of the decisions we make, the everyday choices we make. About whether there is any mystery in the path we travel, is it predestined or is it all up to us. And, of course, the topic that torments me the most - what happens to us once there is no more "us".

I'm not offering any spoilers, really. The first sentence of the book reads, "Twelve years before she decided to die, Nora Seed...". Nora is a 35-year-old woman who goes through all sorts of emotional breakdowns before she comes to the hardest decision for a person - deciding to die. And then She - The Midnight Library comes along.

It's endless and filled with bookshelves of identical looking green books, plus a different one, The Book of Regrets. Behind every regret Nora has uttered in her lifetime is a book with a different life. The change in seemingly small and insignificant decisions she made in her daily life during her lifetime brought each of her potential lives to a completely different end.

In one she's a rock star, in another a glacier explorer, in a third happily and in a fourth unhappily married. Nora begins to test out her parallel lives in search of the perfect one, and each life she tests answers some of the complex questions that plague her "original" life. What would have happened if her father hadn't died so early? What if she had talked to the cute man at the animal shelter? If she hadn't given up music? If she had heard from her brother more often?

Apart from the interesting story it presents, the book is written in a terribly engaging way. We see a real flesh-and-blood Nora with real, adequate torments and regrets. We see her wander through the various at times impenetrable tunnels of life, confused and directionless. How in the next moment the direction becomes clearer bit by bit, step by step, she grows. And somehow, little by little, we begin to think about our life, our perfect scenario, our happiness. And we realize that it is within us, if we can only see it.

I don't know about you, but I often think about the meaning of our existence, about things outside of us, outside of this world, and maybe that's why this thread of the story affected me the most. But it's all worth it, because all of us have fallen into a "hole" and, sadly, all of us have probably yet to fall into one again, at least once. And in those emotional or literally existential "holes" we fall into we begin to question everything we've done. We doubt ourselves, our decisions and our actions and we want someone to come along and show us the right path.

Just like little Alice, yes, she too has fallen into a hole, and she wishes very much that Cat would tell her which road to take, even though she doesn't know where she wants to go and he tells her back that the road doesn't matter. It's the same in "real" life - when you're stuck in a hole, it doesn't matter which path you take, you just have to keep moving, don't give up and you'll get out of it. "Midnight Library" is a wonderful story about that. About that and all the roads you could actually take, as long as you decide to go and listen to your heart for direction.