I tend to pride myself on my ability to talk about books, to identify not just the books I like but why I like them. It’s one of the benefits of having a literature degree. (Is it the only benefit of having a literature degree?)
But the best recommendation I can give of a book I love? Foisting it on someone immediately after reading it. And while the copy of The Midnight Library I just finished doesn’t actually belong to me, that was my first instinct when I finished the last page: to bundle it up and ship it – in triplicate – to readers around the world I care about. The fact that I had only one copy (and it didn’t even belong to me) seems only appropriate once you’ve read this work by Matt Haig.
First off, let me get this out of the way: Haig is writing from the close-third perspective of a female protagonist. And he does it well – and I mean really well – in a way that I thought only Colm TóibÃn did. I have yet to write from a male perspective (though it’s coming up… I’m kind of dreading it…) but the number of men who attempt and fail to write from the female perspective is staggering. Haig, then, is an outlier and a standout one at that.
But what Haig is really writing about in The Midnight Library isn’t so much womanhood or femininity, but a far more universal feeling: regret. A feeling no one wants to feel, but we’ve all felt at one time or another. He explores regret with a phenomenally inquisitive and wholly world-toppling “what if” that sets the reader up, from the very beginning, to swept up into a story that could have seemed formulaic – and yes, OK, occasionally is – but manages to retain a phenomenal humanity throughout that kept me hooked.
This book is a little bit more commercial than I tend to read, but I found myself wrapped up in its occasionally predictable plottiness, in the ending I could see coming a mile away. For with this book, the beauty isn’t in the destination but in the journey. (Perhaps my most meta review of any book, ever.)