I have had quite a love affair with Matt Haig’s books ever since I read The Midnight Library while trapped in an Auckland, New Zealand, hotel for two weeks under covid lockdown. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a novel about escaping into alternative versions of your life hit particularly hard when I could barely leave my room.
So, I was excited to get stuck into , another book set broadly in the same universe, though it isn’t a direct sequel. Once again, we enter a world full of magical realism and philosophy, but where The Midnight Library explores the lives we might have lived in a “what if?” sort of way, The Midnight Train centres on the idea of your life flashing before your eyes. Relatively early in the book, Wilbur, the protagonist, finds himself returning after death to the point in his life when he was the truest version of himself. It makes you wonder which moment you would find yourself in. Throughout the book, Haig plays with the idea that time isn’t experienced evenly: some moments pass almost without consequence, while others hugely shape who we become.
Haig’s work teeters on the edge of sci-fi, blending elements of time travel and alternate realities, although you need a willingness to accept a somewhat magical premise with essentially no scientific explanation. Haig makes this surprisingly easy, even for a scientist accustomed to looking for one.
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One of the book’s most poignant moments comes when Wilbur’s wife, Maggie, wishes she was “the stock market so you could pay me some attention”. It is a line that feels particularly pertinent in a work-obsessed age, where relationships and “life” often come second to our eagerness to get ahead. Beneath the time travel and metaphysics is another of Haig’s very ordinary but important warnings: a life spent in perpetual motion is a life half-lived – one we stop to appreciate only in retrospect.
Though I am undecided on whether it quite tops The Midnight Library, I would say it’s definitely worth boarding The Midnight Train – even if only to make you pause for an extra moment and wonder where your own train might take you.
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