Between life and death there is a library, and within that library, the shelves go on forever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be if you had made other choices . . . Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets? A novel about all the choices that go into a life well lived.

Somewhere out beyond the edge of the universe there is a library that contains an infinite number of books, each one the story of another reality. One tells the story of your life as it is, along with another book for the other life you could have lived if you had made a different choice at any point in your life. While we all wonder how our lives might have been, what if you had the chance to go to the library and see for yourself? Would any of these other lives truly be better?

Nora Seed finds herself faced with this decision. Faced with the possibility of changing her life for a new one, following a different career, undoing old breakups, realizing her dreams of becoming a glaciologist; she must search within herself as she travels through the Midnight Library to decide what is truly fulfilling in life, and what makes it worth living in the first place

Dickens’ Christmas Carol and Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life  both explored characters in crisis being assisted by supernatural guides in re-examining their lives and choices.

Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library makes another fine contribution to that theme with the suicidal and near-death protagonist Nora Seed finding herself in the eponymous library guided by a manifestation of her sympathetic old school librarian in contemplating alternative choices and potential consequences of the lives she could have lived. The books on the library’s infinite shelves describe all her other potential lives and she simply has to pluck one and open it to find herself immersed in the different life that was spawned by a different choice.

I found elements of two particular TV show’s in the Haig’s narrative’s structure.  There is the sci-fi show Quantum Leap  where Dr Sam Beckett finds himself leaping into the body and life of a different person with some historical wrong to right before he can leap again. Although Nora Seed is leaping into a different – parallel – version of her own life, there is still that same discombobulation of struggling to find out where she is, who she is with and what different past life she has led up to this point. Checking her own phone or googling her own name are useful short cuts – but there are plenty of nicely delivered awkward situations where she is the doppelganger stranger in a familiar body.

The second show, slightly more prosaically, is the children’s show Mr Benn where the besuited and bowler hatted hero on the (many) days he chose not to work walks into a fancy dress shop and tries on a new costume. (Our unlamented prime minister Johnson seemed to emulate Mr Benn in so many ways – not least the cos-play dressing up and not doing any work). In his costume Mr Benn steps into a new adventure in a different life – much as Nora Seed does.

However, just as Mr Benn is beckoned back at the adventures end by the shop keeper, or Sam Beckett feels the beginnings of the pull into another Quantum Leap, so too Nora finds herself fading from this sampled existence and drifting back to the midnight library at the point where she realises this is not the life she wants. Presumably that leaves the version of Nora who was leading this life puzzling as she is re-injected into the life that the root-Nora had taken over, doubtless bewildered by some of the choices she has unknowingly made.

The central premise behind the book – the concept of an infinitely bifurcating universe that spawns two new worlds at ever possible moment of decision – is a now familiar one in speculative fiction. The film Sliding Doors with Gwyneth Paltrow and John Hannah captivatingly explored this theme around just a single moment of decision between catching or missing a tube train. Paltorw’s timeline spilt with teh film following the two possible futures (caught the train/missed the train) in intriguing parallel.

As a physicist entertained by the concept of Schrodinger’s Cat – the multiverse concept has fascinated me for ages. The first assembly I delivered in school was on Schrodinger’s Cat and the corollary of all those possibilities existing and happening in parallel. I thought it might help secondary students appreciate their range of future opportunities rather than rail at the rule bound constraints of adolescence. I was careful to explain that no cat actually died in the making of this assembly – it was always just a thought experiment!

There are so many great stories told that examine the what if’s and the second chances, for example Kate Atkinson’s Life after Life and Claire North’s The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August. Like those books some of Nora’s excursions into parallel lives are shockingly short, little more than the opening of a door onto something she quickly realises she never wanted, while in others it takes days for the necessary ennui to set it – and even then parting is not without its sorrows.

To be honest, Nora does more learning on the brink of death then she ever seemed to have done in what Haig (and the librarian) term her ‘root-life’. As with other stories that bring in metaphysical near death epiphanies like Mitch Albom’s The Five People You Meet in Heaven or James Stewart’s guardian angel in It’s a Wonderful Life, it is not so much the experience of seeing your life’s evens flash past your eyes as the protagonist at last reaching a comprehension of their significance.

Haig delivers an interesting interrogation of human expectations of happiness, acquisition of guilt, and self-torture of regret. The fact that so many works of film and literature play with the Schrodinger multiverse or Spiritual second chance concepts is a testament to how fruitful the theme is, or perhaps how much it pre-occupies us humans. Haig even has his protagonist reference Schrodinger explicitly as she tries to understand her extended technicolour near-death experience, and he also references Robert Frost’s poem The Road Not Taken.

I guess one thought from Haig’s book is that our lives – or rather their alternates – have enough adventure to satiate any curiosity without striving to be someone else. Having said that though, as I have pondered on in the past and as Nora’s various adventures reveal, each split in the road doesn’t just change the journey, it changes the traveller too. We are shaped by the different lives we lead – in Nora’s case quite literally as she explores more and less athletic versions of herself.  Ultimately wishing we had made a different choice is almost a kind of suicide in itself, it is wishing a different person had lived a different life.

Which means I think I have finally found a book where I can legitimately make use of the word ontological, for – through all her adventures and discussions within and beyond the midnight library, Nora’s journey and Haig’s writing is preoccupied with the nature of being and existence, and ontology concerns claims about the nature of being and existence.

At first I had thought Haig’s prose a bit direct and functional, simplistic even, an echo of Haig’s other life as a children’s writer. But there were also some lovely lines, mixing humour with sharply expressed observations, for example when Nora reflects on her own parents’ lives and unhappinesses

“Dionna grew up with her parents arguing almost continually, and had consequently believed marriage was something that was not only inevitable, but inevitably miserable.”

“his dad had died of a heart attack when he [Nora’s father] was two, cruelly hiding somewhere behind his first memories.”

Some of the lives Nora samples do seem implausibly successful, reaching pinnacles of sporting or rock star achievement, except that – as Mrs Elm the librarian points out – there are an infinite number of possible lives in the library so there will be inevitably be one where every twist of fate or lucky break turned or fell in just the right way to reach the ultimate success. (After all there is some version of the multiverse where my own humble trilogy has outsold Game of Thrones – wouldn’t we all want to live there!).  With that caveat one can enjoy Nora’s moments in the limelight which accentuate all the risks of being air-dropped into a life she doesn’t know and hasn’t lived yet she must still immediately take to the stage.

Which allows Haig to ask some questions about what success means and to allude to the Happiness Trap.

“I mean, it would have made things a lot easier if we understood there was no way of living that can immunise you against sadness. And that sadness is intrinsically a part of happiness.”

Nora is left worrying whether the flaws she feels in her life are a matter of inbuilt nature rather than circumstanced nurture.

“Are there any other lives at all or is it just the furnishings that change.”

Like Claire North’s Harry August and his fellow Ouboran migrating through a succession of parallel universes with each new life they lead, Nora, it seems is not alone in her taster sampling of various lives.

She meets another character – who terms himself a ‘slider’ – who, while his body lies comatose in a hospital bed, is exploring the other lives he might have lived. At this point Haig plays with science and perception in giving a sci-fi gloss of reality to Nora’s metaphysical experience.

The fellow traveller tells Nora

“I would think that the human brain can’t handle the complexity of an open quantum wave function and so it organises or translates this complexity into something it understands.”

By which he means the library.  To be fair every perception, even an understanding of colour, is an interpretation of reality mediated and moderated by the limitations of our senses and our brain architecture.  The solidity we ascribe to objects around us is a mental overlay imposed on the truly diaphanous and insubstantial nature of atoms that are mostly as empty as the interstellar void. Only a neutron star is truly solid!

As Nora cycles through many lives there is a bit of a Groundhog Day feel to the narrative, not so much living the same life in different ways, but living different lives in fundamentally the same way – and still learning through the experience as epiphany approaches.

And it helps (from my perspective at least) that in so many of Nora’s alternate vicariously sampled lives climate change casts a distinct shadow; From Nora’s self-deprecating observation

“I am a waste of a carbon footprint”,

through some Australian graffiti

“THE WORLD IS ON FIRE… ONE EARTH = ONE CHANCE”

to a life researching  the ice denuded islands of Svalbard.

From the forest fires threatening homes and business of two different California based Nora-lives to the climate books and Silent Spring on the study shelves of one academically orientated life – the pages of Haig’s The Midnight Library are pleasingly seasoned with climate change references. As Matthew Schneider-Mayerson has observed – (words to the effect that) “soon all fiction will be climate change fiction.”

Ultimately, for all the lives she experiences – in many of them having pursued an abandoned adolescent interest into some form of global triumph – Nora’s story reminds us that we are all polymaths of some form. Multi-skilled, multi-talented, and multi-interested. (I like acting, writing, cricket, science and politics – and while I have never met any national, let alone international standard of achievement in those fields, I have pursued each enough to derive a sense of personal accomplishment and enjoyment.)

As with George Bailey’s guardian angel Clarence Odbody in Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life, Mrs Elm reminds Nora of the difference she has made to people in her root life

“Never underestimate the big importance of small things, Mrs Elm had said. You must always remember that.”

Which is what added sufficient poignancy to one moment near the book’s end to have me tearing up a bit.

Haig’s sharp observations include notes like

“So this is about your brother?”

“No. it’s about everything. It seems impossible to live without hurting people.”

“That’s because it is.”

And

“Nora wanted to live in a world where no cruelty existed, but the only worlds she had available to her were worlds with humans in them.”

Which seems sadly resonant (although cats can be quite cruel too.)

As Haig toys with ideas about the significance of love and life and connections, this is an easily digested readable book which I consumed in a day – finishing appropriately enough – on the dot of midnight. I leave the final word to Haig/Nora

“It is a quite a revelation to discover that the place you wanted to escape to is the exact same place you escaped from. That the prison wasn’t the place, but the perspective.”

The Midnight Library is available now. You can pick up your copy on Bookshop.org