Guest review by Julia Jarman: THE MIDNIGHT LIBRARY by Matt Haig

 

"I won’t do spoilers, just say I’m really glad I read this book, which is entertaining and wise."

Photograph by Linda Newbery

Julia Jarman has written books for children of all ages. Her work includes The Time Travelling Cat series for readers of eight to twelve or thereabouts and the acclaimed picture book, Big Red Bath. She is currently trying her hand at writing for adults ‘to see if I can’.

Matt Haig has been sitting on my bookshelf for years – unread. How daft was I! Though highly recommended by a respected friend, The Humans did not appeal. Foolishly I let the blurb put me off, with a single word: aliens. The hint of sci-fi aroused my prejudices – I prefer realism or so I thought- and the book stayed closed. Then my reading-group chose The Midnight Library and I felt bound to give it a go despite the blurb which made it clear that suicidal Nora is ‘transported’ – yes, that sort of transported – at the stroke of midnight, to a fantasy library where she can choose an alternative life as easily as choosing a book. Her choice is limited to her own life. She can re-write it by going back in time to choices she made and choosing differently. Nora is attracted to this idea and so was I; it’s a fascinating theme.

Who hasn’t wasted time what-iffing? What if I’d married so-and-so? What if I’d gone to that job interview? What if I’d caught that train? Penelope Lively uses her ‘what ifs’ to good effect in Making It Up, a novel published in 2005. She uses her writing skills and imagination to create lives she might have lived in what she calls a confabulation or ‘anti-memoir’. True and not-true it reads like a novel-cum-biography. I enjoyed it very much. But would I enjoy The Midnight Library where the imaginative leaps are more daring?

Fortunately, the book begins realistically enough, with Nora nineteen years earlier, a worried teenager, in the school library during a wet break, talking to the comfortable, knowledgeable librarian Mrs Elm, who tells her prosaically enough that she has her whole life before her and could do anything she wanted. I liked and believed in both characters – even the excessively talented Nora - which was a good start. Mrs Elm turns up again later in the midnight library, which arises out of the mist, and that’s good news too, aiding credibility. Now Nora is thirty-five and she has already written her suicide note. She feels a complete failure and worse, she has no hope for a better future. She feels she will go on failing and is full of shame and regret for the opportunities she has not taken and the people she feels she has let down: her father for not becoming a champion swimmer; her brother and friend Ravi for leaving the pop group they’d formed; her lover Dan for jilting him two days before the wedding. The list goes on: Nora had more talents than most of us and a lot of people investing in her – and living through her.

But now Nora has a chance to explore those ‘might have been’ lives, and if she wants, choose one of them in preference to hers. Nora takes the chance and makes some remarkable discoveries. I won’t do spoilers, just say I’m really glad I read this book, which is entertaining and wise. I’ve now read The Humans which I also thoroughly enjoyed. Bring on the aliens!

The Midnight Library is published by Canongate.

More reviews by Julia Jarman:

Notes from an Exhibition by Patrick Gale

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner

Guest review by Sue Purkiss: IVY & ABE by Elizabeth Enfield

Sue Purkiss writes for children and young people. She has been a Royal Literary Fellow at Exeter and Bristol Universities, and has also taught English and worked with young offender. Her latest novel for children, Jack Fortune and the Search for the Hidden Valley, is an adventure story set in the Himalayas at the end of the 18th century, featuring plant hunters, a sacred mountain – and its mysterious guardian! For more information, see Sue's website. She also has her own literary review blog, A Fool on a Hill, and is a contributor to The History Girls, blogging there once each month.

Ivy & Abe tells the story – or rather, stories – of the eponymous characters. I almost wrote ‘couple’ there, and they usually are a couple, but not always. For this is one of those books that explores the idea that what happens is not inevitable, was not always ‘meant to be’. In a way, it’s a comforting notion, that if everything is fore-ordained – if Fate rules supreme – then we really don’t have to worry very much about the choices we make: everything will be as it will be.

This beautifully-written book begins in 2026. By chance, Ivy and Abe, both in their seventies, meet in a supermarket. They realise that they knew each other when they were children; they were the closest of friends, but then one family moved after a tragedy and they were separated. They get to know each other again, and become close in a way they were not with their previous partners: they feel that they are two parts of a whole. They marry, and have a precious, albeit very short, time together.

The next episode takes place in 2015, with the characters younger now. Once again, they meet and part. And so it goes on, moving backwards through the years, until they are children again and we learn why Abe’s family moved away. At each stage there's an encounter, sometimes intense, sometimes fleeting – in one, Ivy, distressed, is helped by a kindly stranger (Abe). He puts her into a cab and pays the fare, and gives her his card, while assuring her there is no need to get in touch. She intends to, but the card is lost and the chance for them to properly meet each other is lost. In another, there is a passionate affair, and so on.

Other motifs recur. There is a lorry carrying hay bales, which has an accident. This has varying consequences. One time, Abe is driving back from a meeting with Ivy and witnesses the accident. The police later contact him, and so his wife (always Lynne) discovers that he wasn’t where he was supposed to be, and that he is having an affair – and of course, her discovery has consequences. Another time, it is Abe’s mother who witnesses the accident, cradles a dying victim in her arms, and is so overwhelmed by the experience that the course of her life changes completely. We must all have thought at some time, What if? What if I’d left the house a moment earlier? What if I’d chosen to be somewhere else that day? What if the road hadn’t been icy? And so on. That’s one of the things this book is about.

Another motif is the hereditary illness which blights Ivy’s family. Another is Abe’s job: he designs fountains. One of them, which recurs several times, is modelled on a clock: it’s a sort of meditation on time. And very early on, the author introduces the concept of quantum entanglement:

“It’s to do with the behaviour of particles, tiny ones, like electrons, that have interacted in the past and then moved apart…they say that even if they end up millions of miles or galaxies apart, they still continue to be affected by each other. Tickle one and the other dances…”

Later, this is picked up when the eruption of the Icelandic volcano has kept Ivy’s husband, Richard, out of the country when she needs him with her for a significant hospital appointment – which in turn leads to that episode’s very brief encounter with Abe. She sees the ash on her windows, and wonders: could particles from another part of the world really settle here so quickly?

The concept of the book reminds me of Kate Atkinson's Life After Life. That, too, explores the what if notion, by positing a number of possible futures if events had conjoined in a different way. It plays out on a different stage: instead of focusing on the lives of ordinary people, it considers what might have happened if, for instance, a certain girl had been in a certain café in the 1930s with the intention of shooting Adolf Hitler; and it plays out against a background of social change.

This book is quieter, perhaps. But Elizabeth Enfield explores beautifully the way in which so-called ordinary lives play out: she reflects on how relationships change at different times of our lives, on what shifts things from one direction into another.

Recently, I went to a Magritte exhibition. Magritte was a surrealist, and I’ve never really ‘got’ surrealism. But as I wandered round, I came to see that it really didn’t matter whether I got it or not: I just needed to look. And then I saw what a marvellous painter he was. And my reaction to this book was a bit like that. At first I thought, yes – great fun for a writer to play with different possibilities in this way, to try out different stories for her characters, but really, for the reader, what’s the point? But actually, I think the point is that this is a structure which allows Elizabeth Enfield to explore and reflect on life and all its variousness – and what could be more worthwhile than that?

Sometimes, you want to experience waves crashing on the shore, or a waterfall tumbling over rocks. But if you’re in the mood for a still, quiet, clear pool, this is the book for you.

Ivy & Abe is published by Michael Joseph.