How many times have we wondered with regret, as we grew older, on how life could have been otherwise — what if we had chosen a different career, what if we had loved differently, what if we had held on to some of our broken relationships, or what if we had handled our finances better? This, despite understanding that such regrets can only diminish the quality of our current lives. The Midnight Library cautions us to think more carefully about what we wish for, and gently nudges us to be more comfortable in with what we have.
This book is a combination of science fiction and human relationships pertaining to the little things that matter. It is not completely new though. I’m aware of at least two movies (Click and the Bollywood movie Baar Baar Dekho) that had similar premises. The main protagonist is the extremely talented 35 year old Nora Seed, who lives in her childhood town of Bedford. She could have been an Olympic swimmer, part of a Coldplay-like band, an academic high-achiever or an oceanographer and a happy wife and mother at the same time. But a combination of misfortune and a “life fright”, as one of the other characters in the story puts it, causes her to disintegrate wanting her nothing more than the absence of pain. And that brings her to The Midnight Library where there are seemingly endless books on how her life would be if she had made some other decision at some point in her life. The starting point is The Book of Regrets which details all that she would have liked to change. And she can choose to change any of that and then step in to live the life that would have ensued.
Haig has had his own issues with depression and nearly killed himself once. In that light, the book is one of the struggles of a depressed person and redemption. The book begins with a lot of promise. The setup is interesting and provokes thought. However, despite a short length of under 300 pages, the book starts feeling repetitive fairly soon, feels episodic and seems a tad too glib. It’s almost as if Haig came up with a brilliant idea but didn’t really know how to stretch it to a decent-sized novel. This book was somewhere between a 3-star and a 4-star for me. What swung it towards the latter is that it can help readers minimise the regrets that they have and leaves them with an important message, as voiced by Mrs. Elm, The Librarian: “Never underestimate the big importance of small things”.
Pros: Interesting plot, helps readers minimise the regrets that they have
Cons: Becomes repetitive
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