“The Midnight Library”? Until a friend praised it on Facebook, it was a book I’d never heard of.
Matt Haig? Until “The Midnight Library”, he was an author I’d never read.
And that seems to be the message. Both from Matt Haig and “The Midnight Library”. Give it a go or you’ll never know. The trying is all. Life may be a cabaret but sitting alone in your room doesn’t cut the mustard. Slogans like that, anyway.
Matt is no stranger to the lost and lonely feeling of hopelessness. He has struggled with depression and has stepped back from the edge when life, for him, could easily have been ended. So while a library full of countless books where each book is a potential life in a parallel universe may be the densest of mazes for an author to lead us into, Matt leads us well.
Does his philosophical library, balancing delicately on the edge of life and death, really work? We all respond differently to such what-if stories. Some may see only over-wrought metaphors in the telling truths seen by others. There can be a big difference between admiring the weave and liking the cloth.
I think Matt Haig writes simply and well and I think Matt Haig is imaginative and I think that at the end of “The Midnight Library”, you will too.
At the End of the Day 