Maybe in some lives you just float around and expect nothing else and don’t even try to change. Maybe that was most lives. [p. 80]
Nora's life is falling apart -- the death of her cat, the loss of her job, estrangement from her brother -- and she decides to commit suicide. Instead of ending up dead, though, she finds herself in a mysterious library where all the books are stories of her alternate selves, starting at the moment -- midnight -- when she's hanging between life and death. There is also a warm wise librarian, Mrs Elm, whose kindness Nora recalls from the day at school when she learnt of her father's death. Mrs Elm tells Nora the rules: "'Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be different if you had made other choices . . . Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets?’"
So Nora embarks on a liminal game of What If. And yes, the grass is always greener until you see it up close. The country pub she might be running with her ex? The decision to keep her cat indoors that night? The career as an Olympic swimmer? The life in the limelight as part of a successful rock band? A glaciologist? A happily-married academic?
There is another book in the Midnight Library, the Book of Regrets. And with each life that Nora samples, she sees a regret or two fading out of existence as she realises that all lives have good and bad elements, aspects of compromise, things one wishes one had done differently. Eh, the human condition. She also realises that many of her regrets are tangled up in other people's ideas about her: her father wanted her to be a champion swimmer, her brother wanted the two of them to be in a band, her ex Dan wanted to run a pub.
There has been a lot of very positive commentary about this novel, and I am happy that it's making it easier to discuss mental health issues. Yet Nora sometimes feels like a case study rather than a person. Her depression, at the beginning of the book, is at least partly situational: bad things are happening to her. As I read, I could identify the various cognitive distortions Nora was experiencing: catastrophising, believing one knows what others are thinking, personalisation, dismissing the positive ... There's also a fascinating thread left dangling, when Nora encounters another self-described 'slider' who's moving from life to life in the same way as Nora. He explains their shared state in terms of quantum possibilities and universal wave functions. Nora doesn't show much interest in this, though -- which is fair enough since it's irrelevant to the aim of the novel -- and doesn't seem inclined to attempt to contact this individual in her subsequent lives. I'd have liked to encounter him again, and for him and Nora to discuss the differences in their experiences.
This review is making it sound as though I didn't enjoy The Midnight Library, which is not the case. It was highly readable and there were scenes that brought tears to my eyes (and scenes that made me smile). The plethora of possible lives made me think about my own divergence points -- and the reminder, throughout, that small things can make as much of a difference as bigger things, was a timely one. I believe this novel will help a lot of people to think about their own mental health or that of those close to them: and that is a very positive thing.
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