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A review by elerireads
The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
1.75
Hmm this was vaguely interesting to start with but as it went on it got kind of boring, and the annoying stupid things about the concept became more and more obvious and irritating. So by the end of it, all I could think about was how bad it was.
So first of all I think it's really stupid to suggest you can really experience what another life would be like if you were plonked into it without any of the knowledge that you would actually have in that life.(a) It just makes the experience of trying other lives incredibly stressful. That's where 90% of the tension in this book comes from - trivial stuff like trying to figure out where your house is. It's maybe interesting the first few times but there are so many lives Nora tries out and it felt like Haig was trying to get through every possible variant - "Oh no! I don't know where I work!", "Oh no! I have to give an inspirational speech with no preprepared slides!", "Oh no! I have to sing a song I supposedly wrote, in front of thousands of people!", "Oh no! I'm supposed to be a glaciologist but I know nothing about glaciers!". Seriously we got the point after the first few and it got old really quickly. Just became an annoying gimmick to me. And that stress is not at all representative of what it would be like to live that life with your memories intact! I understand it would be a much duller book without that stuff but honestly I think that just reflects the fact it's a bit of a naff concept. (b) Memories and knowledge make up an enormous part of your lived experience. I would bet that the proportion of our thoughts that are memories is really high. What if something really awful and traumatic had happened to you in the life you picked but you'd never told anyone about it? Or equally maybe you'd had some giant epiphany? The random other version of you would never know. I feel like it kind of does a disservice to the richness of people's inner lives.
Secondly, Nora is a moron. It's only in the final life she tries that it occurs to her that she might not be able to be satisfied with a life she didn't earn. That was the first thing I thought right near the beginning when the concept was explained - you'd always feel like a fraud and wouldn't be able to derive any of the self-esteem boosts that come from your achievements.
Thirdly, the version of Mrs Elm in the midnight library was an incredibly tedious character. She was supposed to be all mysterious and wise (albeit also only some kind of figment of Nora's imagination, so limited as to how wise she could be...), but nothing she ever said was even remotely interesting or valuable. By the second half I was just skipping over all the sections in the library because it was so annoying and not adding anything at all.
Fourthly, none of the characters were well-written. Including Nora. I didn't feel like I actually got to know any of them as people, so I didn't really get that invested in any of them.
Fifthly, a lot of this was just crap self-help psychobabble (badly) disguised as a novel with some plot filled with obvious holes. It was nowhere near as bad, but it did give me flashbacks to 'Ta deuxième vie commence quand tu comprends que tu n'en a qu'une', which I would say is actually the worst book I've ever read.
Random minor gripe: when Nora started to want to live again, it suddenly became a whole issue that if she died in one of the alternative lives she tried then she would actually die. It felt like that was conveniently sort of sidestepped earlier on when she was suicidal. Why didn't she just kill herself in one of the alternative lives? Seemed like a bit of a plothole to me.
Related to that, this book was completely predictable from the outset and (not to be a weird morbid person who's rooting for a main character to kill themselves or anything) I think it would have been a much more interesting book if she'd ended up deciding she still wanted to die. Also probably irresponsible and unpublishable, but still. In quite a few of the earlier lives she was more outwardly 'successful' but still miserable, on antidepressants, etc. And I thought for a second it might be making a point about predisposition towards mental illness mattering more than external circumstances. Not that I would necessarily have agreed, but it would have been a lot bolder and more interesting than the much more pedestrian point it ended up making about conventional ideas of success not being what actually makes people happy.
Finally, despite all the negativity in this review, from the giant essay I've accidentally just written it's clear that this book sparked a lot of thoughts so was interesting from that perspective if nothing else. So I'm still glad I read it. One thing I did like was that each Nora was clearly a different person with different tastes and habits, etc. Regret is, of course, a completely natural human emotion, but I've always felt there was no point dwelling on - and certainly not torturing yourself over - what might have happened if things had turned out differently. Our experiences shape us so much that it's impossible to imagine what your life would have been like because you would have to imagine yourself as a completely different person, which is incredibly difficult to do. You wouldn't necessarily feel the emotions that the true version of yourself would feel if suddenly plonked into that life.
So first of all I think it's really stupid to suggest you can really experience what another life would be like if you were plonked into it without any of the knowledge that you would actually have in that life.(a) It just makes the experience of trying other lives incredibly stressful. That's where 90% of the tension in this book comes from - trivial stuff like trying to figure out where your house is. It's maybe interesting the first few times but there are so many lives Nora tries out and it felt like Haig was trying to get through every possible variant - "Oh no! I don't know where I work!", "Oh no! I have to give an inspirational speech with no preprepared slides!", "Oh no! I have to sing a song I supposedly wrote, in front of thousands of people!", "Oh no! I'm supposed to be a glaciologist but I know nothing about glaciers!". Seriously we got the point after the first few and it got old really quickly. Just became an annoying gimmick to me. And that stress is not at all representative of what it would be like to live that life with your memories intact! I understand it would be a much duller book without that stuff but honestly I think that just reflects the fact it's a bit of a naff concept. (b) Memories and knowledge make up an enormous part of your lived experience. I would bet that the proportion of our thoughts that are memories is really high. What if something really awful and traumatic had happened to you in the life you picked but you'd never told anyone about it? Or equally maybe you'd had some giant epiphany? The random other version of you would never know. I feel like it kind of does a disservice to the richness of people's inner lives.
Secondly, Nora is a moron. It's only in the final life she tries that it occurs to her that she might not be able to be satisfied with a life she didn't earn. That was the first thing I thought right near the beginning when the concept was explained - you'd always feel like a fraud and wouldn't be able to derive any of the self-esteem boosts that come from your achievements.
Thirdly, the version of Mrs Elm in the midnight library was an incredibly tedious character. She was supposed to be all mysterious and wise (albeit also only some kind of figment of Nora's imagination, so limited as to how wise she could be...), but nothing she ever said was even remotely interesting or valuable. By the second half I was just skipping over all the sections in the library because it was so annoying and not adding anything at all.
Fourthly, none of the characters were well-written. Including Nora. I didn't feel like I actually got to know any of them as people, so I didn't really get that invested in any of them.
Fifthly, a lot of this was just crap self-help psychobabble (badly) disguised as a novel with some plot filled with obvious holes. It was nowhere near as bad, but it did give me flashbacks to 'Ta deuxième vie commence quand tu comprends que tu n'en a qu'une', which I would say is actually the worst book I've ever read.
Random minor gripe: when Nora started to want to live again, it suddenly became a whole issue that if she died in one of the alternative lives she tried then she would actually die. It felt like that was conveniently sort of sidestepped earlier on when she was suicidal. Why didn't she just kill herself in one of the alternative lives? Seemed like a bit of a plothole to me.
Related to that, this book was completely predictable from the outset and (not to be a weird morbid person who's rooting for a main character to kill themselves or anything) I think it would have been a much more interesting book if she'd ended up deciding she still wanted to die. Also probably irresponsible and unpublishable, but still. In quite a few of the earlier lives she was more outwardly 'successful' but still miserable, on antidepressants, etc. And I thought for a second it might be making a point about predisposition towards mental illness mattering more than external circumstances. Not that I would necessarily have agreed, but it would have been a lot bolder and more interesting than the much more pedestrian point it ended up making about conventional ideas of success not being what actually makes people happy.
Finally, despite all the negativity in this review, from the giant essay I've accidentally just written it's clear that this book sparked a lot of thoughts so was interesting from that perspective if nothing else. So I'm still glad I read it. One thing I did like was that each Nora was clearly a different person with different tastes and habits, etc. Regret is, of course, a completely natural human emotion, but I've always felt there was no point dwelling on - and certainly not torturing yourself over - what might have happened if things had turned out differently. Our experiences shape us so much that it's impossible to imagine what your life would have been like because you would have to imagine yourself as a completely different person, which is incredibly difficult to do. You wouldn't necessarily feel the emotions that the true version of yourself would feel if suddenly plonked into that life.