Matt Haig, Biography
From his website:
Matt Haig is an author for children and adults. His memoir Reasons to Stay Alive was a number one bestseller, staying in the British top ten for 46 weeks.
His children’s book A Boy Called Christmas was a runaway hit and is translated in over 40 languages. It is being made into a film; The Guardian called it an "instant classic."
Although not acknowledged on his website, or Wikipedia, several articles have been written about his struggle with depression.
From Wikipedia:
Haig was born on 3 July 1975 in Sheffield, studied English and History at the University of Hull.
His novels are often dark and quirky takes on family life.
Matt Haig, Biography
From Wikipedia:
His novels for adults include:
How To Stop Time (a novel about a man who appears to be 40 but has, in fact, lived for more than 400 years),
The Radleys (a vampire novel),
The Humans (the story of an alien who takes the identity of a university lecturer whose work in mathematics threatens the stability of the planet but who must also cope with his home life),
and the number one bestseller The Midnight Library. (It was shortlisted for the 2021 British Book Awards "Fiction book of the year.")
Midnight Library, Matt Haig
Quick summary:
Nora Seed is unhappy in her life, tries to kill herself and finds herself at The Midnight Library, where she is able to try out different versions of her life. Through these alternate realities, she learns that the paths she'd regretted giving up weren't what she'd thought they would be. She eventually finds a life she's happy in, but in the process she learns that her original life had value. The Library dissolves as Nora decides to live. Nora returns to her original life, except now with less regret and hope for the future.
Midnight Library, Matt Haig
More detail:
The Midnight Library opens with a teenaged Nora Seed, smart, a talented swimmer. She is playing chess with the school librarian, Mrs. Elm, when she gets the news of her father's death.
Nineteen years later, Nora is a 35-year-old woman unhappy in her life. A neighbor, Ash, informs her that her cat, Voltaire ("Volts"), has been hit by a car. Nora is upset, late for work, and gets fired by her boss, Neil.
She also runs into Ravi, once a band member with Nora and her brother Joe. Both men blame her for dropping out just when they had a chance at a major record deal.
After a string of other unfortunate events—she was fired as a music tutor and remembers having grown apart from her former best friend Izzy—Nora decides to die, and overdoses on pills at midnight.
Midnight Library, Matt Haig
More detail:
After a string of other unfortunate events—she was fired as a music tutor and remembers having grown apart from her former best friend Izzy—Nora decides to die, and overdoses on pills at midnight.
She finds herself surrounded by mist and discovers The Midnight Library, where infinite rows of books represent portals into different variations of her life.
Mrs. Elm (or something that resembles her) serves as Nora's guide, explaining that the Library exists between life and death. Nora can stay in these alternate realities as long as she desires, but if she loses her will to live, she will die.
Nora first tries out a life with her ex, Dan, whom she nearly married, only to discover that he would have gotten bored and cheated on her.
Midnight Library, Matt Haig
More detail:
She also tries a life trying to keep Volts indoors to keep him from being hit by the car, but learns the cat actually died of a health condition.
Next, Nora is transported into a life with Izzy in Australia but finds out Izzy would have died in a car accident.
Nora then tries Olympic swimming, only to find herself depressed in that life too.
When she tests out life as an Artic researcher, she meets Hugo Lefèvre, who is also jumping between his alternate realities and has been doing so for a long time. She doesn't want to keep "leaping," but longs for a life where she can settle down.
Midnight Library, Matt Haig
More detail:
Nora tries a life where she stayed in the band and became a famous rock star, but learns that it led to Joe dying from substance abuse.
From there, Mrs. Elm encourages Nora to pursue less "obvious" paths. Nora ends up trying out a multitude of lives and careers, ranging from becoming a single mom to running a winery or being an aid worker, but nothing sticks.
Finally, Nora recalls how Ash had once asked her out and tries a life where she'd accepted that date. She's married to Ash, a surgeon, has a daughter Molly and a dog Plato. In that life, she has patched up her relationship with Joe, and he is happily married. Nora thinks that this may be the best version of her life.
Midnight Library, Matt Haig
More detail:
However, when she goes back to her hometown she sees that her absence has had an impact. Her neighbor, whom she helped out, had to move to a care facility. The music store she worked in as a salesperson has closed. And her music student, Leo, ended up falling in with a bad crowd instead of discovering his aptitude for piano.
So she lets go of that life and returns to the Midnight Library as it is falling apart. Mrs. Elm explains that her desire to live out her original life is causing the destruction. She tells Nora how to exit by finding the book that represents her original life, and the Midnight Library dissolves.
When Nora is back in her original life, she stumbles outside for help (from her overdose) and soon wakes in a hospital.
Midnight Library, Matt Haig
More detail:
With her regrets laid to rest and with hope for the future, Nora is able to turn her life around.
She patches things up with her brother, solicits more students for music lessons to make a living, and volunteers at a homeless shelter.
She also seeks out the real Mrs. Elm at the care facility to resume their games of chess.
Genres:
Speculative fiction: a broad category that encompasses genres with elements that do not exist in reality, recorded history, nature, or the present universe. Such fiction covers various themes in the context of supernatural, futuristic, and other imaginative realms.
The genres under this umbrella category include, but are not limited to, science fiction, fantasy, horror, superhero fiction, alternate history, utopian and dystopian fiction, and supernatural fiction, as well as combinations thereof (Wikipedia).
Science fiction
Fantasy fiction
Philosophical fiction
Speculative Fiction
Speculative fiction has a long history, from ancient works to paradigm-changing and neotraditional works of the 21st century, although the term didn't originate until more recent days.
Its recognition as a genre has often been attributed to Robert A. Heinlein, who first used the term in an editorial in The Saturday Evening Post, Feb. 8, 1947. In that article, he used it as a synonym for science fiction and later explicitly stated that the term did not include fantasy.
Earlier occurrences of the term include a piece in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine in 1889 in reference to Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward: 2000–1887 and other works. Another term for this genre is speculative literature.
Speculative Fiction
In ancient Greek literature, theorists cite Euripides' story of Medea, as well as his play Hippolytus.
In historiography, works now known as "speculative fiction" were previously known as "historical invention," or "historical fiction." And Shakespeare is among them for his imaginative creations in A Midsummer Night's Dream, although I think you could argue for a number of other plays.
In mythography, the concept of speculative fiction has been termed "mythopoesis," or the creative design and generation of lore and mythology for works of fiction. The term's definition comes from its use by J. R. R. Tolkien, whose Lord of the Rings, illustrates this process.
Speculative Fiction
The creation of speculative fiction in its general sense of hypothetical history, explanation, or ahistorical storytelling, has also been attributed to authors in ostensibly non-fiction modes since as early as Herodotus.
Speculative fiction has long pre-dated coining of the term as a genre. In the broadest sense, its concept captures both a conscious and unconscious aspect of human psychology in making sense of the world, and responds to it by creating imaginative, inventive, and artistic expressions.
Speculative Fiction
The term "speculative fiction" was popularized in the 1960s and early 1970s to express dissatisfaction with traditional science fiction. However, this use of the term fell into disuse around the mid-1970s.
In the 2000s, the term came into wider use as a convenient collective term for a set of genres. However, some writers, such as Margaret Atwood, continue to distinguish "speculative fiction" specifically as a "no Martians" type of science fiction.
Speculative Fiction
According to publisher statistics, men outnumber women about two to one among English-language speculative fiction writers; however, the percentages vary considerably by genre, with women outnumbering men in the fields of urban fantasy, paranormal romance and young adult fiction.
NOTE: Matt Haig has also written young adult fiction
The term has been used by some critics and writers dissatisfied with the limitation that science fiction must adhere to scientific principles. They argue that "speculative fiction" better defines an expanded, open, imaginative type of fiction than does "genre fiction," and the categories of "fantasy," "mystery," "horror," and "science fiction."
Questions for discussion
This particular fantasy, about living a different life, sometimes with a different identity, has been around a long time. Why is this imaginative, alternative, escapist reality so popular?
Questions for discussion
“If you really want to live a life hard enough, you don’t have to worry,” Mrs. Elm tells her. “The moment you decide you want that life, really want it, then everything that exists in your head now, including this Midnight Library, will eventually be a dream. A memory so vague and intangible it will hardly be there at all.”
Questions for discussion
My reason for talking about this novel is that "speculative" fiction is a pervasive element in much of literature.
Although they don’t fit in this category, Jane Austen's novels, particularly Persuasion, is speculative about marriage partners and the lives that could be lived.
The speculative is common also in historical fiction particularly when factual details are scarce. See, for example, Girl Waits With Gun.
It's even more common in modern literature, often based on the theory that reality is not a hard and fast truth, but a consensus of our own perspective. See Girl on a Train, Gone Girl (definitively!), The Other Typist, even Elizabeth Strout, the short story cycle of Olive Kittridge. Modern novels often focus on individual perspective and psychological insight.
Questions for discussion
Don't we as readers in fact enter the author's fictional reality when we read?
Isn't that why we read, to get caught up in another reality and experience that fictional one, for a time, as we read, until we re-enter our real life.
Through a novel as imaginative faction, we can live in another reality, someone else's reality, and perhaps experience or learn from that?
That is what the film The Words, explores.
The Words—Plot summary (Wikipedia)
Clayton Hammond (Dennis Quaid) attends a public reading of his new book, The Words. As he begins reading, he focuses on a fictional character named Rory Jansen (Bradley Cooper), an aspiring writer who lives in NYC with his girlfriend Dora (Zoe Saldana).
Rory borrows money from his father, gets a job as a mail supervisor at a literary agency, and attempts to sell his first novel, which is repeatedly rejected by publishers.
After living together for some time, Rory and Dora marry and honeymoon in Paris, where Dora buys Rory an old briefcase he admired in an antiques store.
The Words—Plot summary (Wikipedia)
After returning to America and having his book rejected again, Rory finds an old but masterfully written manuscript in the briefcase with a central character named Jack. Rory types the manuscript into his laptop to know what it feels like to write something truly great, even if it's only pretend.
Later, while using the laptop, Dora finds the novel, reads it, and mistakenly assumes Rory wrote the novel. She convinces him to give it to his publisher at work, Joseph Cutler, who finally reads the manuscript after several months. He offers Rory a contract which he accepts. The book is a hit and Rory becomes famous.
At this point, Hammond takes a break from the reading and goes backstage where his agent introduces him to a student and amateur writer who wants to interview him. He says he's separated from his wife, although he still wears a wedding ring. Hammond agrees to meet her after the ceremony and returns to the stage to continue reading the book.
The Words—Plot summary (Wikipedia)
The second part of the reading details Rory's encounter with "The Old Man" (Jeremy Irons) in New York City's Central Park, who reveals himself as the true author of the manuscript, based on his life in Paris. When he was a young man (Ben Barnes) stationed in France during the final days of World War II, he fell in love with Celia, a French waitress. They eventually married and had a daughter, but the baby died.
Unable to cope with the loss, Celia moved back to her parents. He used his pain as inspiration to write the manuscript, which he took to Celia while visiting at her parents' home. She found the story so moving that she chose to return to him.
However, she unintentionally left the manuscript in a briefcase on the train after her trip back to Paris, thereby losing it. Because of the loss of the manuscript, their reconciliation was short-lived, and they divorced soon afterwards.
The Words—Plot summary (Wikipedia)
The public reading ends and Hammond tells his fans they must buy the book to learn how it ends. Daniella then accompanies Hammond back to his apartment where she pressures him into telling her the ending. Hammond explains that Rory tells the truth about the creation of the story, first to his wife and then to Cutler. Also, Rory tells Cutler he wants to credit the old man as the true author. Cutler angrily advises against this as it would severely damage both their reputations, and recommends giving the old man a share of the book's profits instead.
Rory then seeks out the old man to pay him and finds him working in a plant nursery. The old man refuses the money but, after doing so, reveals that while once riding a train to work, years after his divorce, he spotted Celia with a new husband and a young son at a train station. The old man points out that people always move on from their mistakes, and Rory will too.
The Words—Plot summary (Wikipedia)
Daniella pressures Hammond for more details. He reveals that the old man died not long after Rory's second meeting with him along with the secret about who the manuscript's author really is. Daniella deduces that The Words is actually an autobiographical book, with Rory as Hammond's surrogate. She reassures him that people move on from their mistakes, but he pulls away, telling her that there is a fine line between life and fiction.
The film flashes back to Rory and Dora in their tiny kitchen, as Rory whispers "I'm sorry" in her ear.
Questions for discussion
Perhaps the book is about that last comment: “there is a fine line between life and fiction.“
Questions for Discussion
In The Words, there are layers of fiction and reality, or boxes within boxes, or nested Russian dolls, as one critic phrased it.
At the base is the novel written by the Jeremy Irons character to cope with his grief when his child dies.
That’s the novel Bradley Cooper finds in the old briefcase and re-types as his own to become rich and famous.
Dennis Quad writes a novel about the experience of these two men, also popular.
All through this sequence, reality is fictionalized, and when fictionalized the story is taken over by someone else. That fictional version of reality becomes someone else’s property, and in a sense therefore belongs to them.
Questions for Discussion
This is a modern theme; see the novels cited above, particularly Gone Girl, the definitive treatment of this theme.
So, what do you think? Or is this a subject of interest only to writers, and English teachers?
Commentary
If I've had a theme thus far in this course, or a couple of themes, it's these:
Beginning with Anthony Horowitz, The Word is Murder, we looked at an author who loves to play with language, with genre (the murder mystery) and with the thin line between reality and imaginative fiction.
As you probably remember, in that novel, he's both AH the author and AH a character he's created in his own fiction, playing a surrogate to himself in the role of Watson to Hawthorne's Sherlock Holmes.
Throughout the novel, he waffles between both roles, sometimes addressing readers as the author of this fiction and sometimes talking to them as the character in the murder mystery. It can be confusing, and is meant to be.
And AH the author and the character often share many factual details belonging to the author. But then the character is the author.
Commentary
If I've had a theme thus far in this course, or a couple of themes, it's these:
Horowitz is known for his manipulation of mystery plots. Often the detective in the story has to solve the case that purports to be the primary fiction by reading and analyzing the clues hidden within another mystery narrative. So, he writes a book within a book. He's known for that.
Or alternatively, he "piggy backs" books so that you have to have read the first book, like Magpie Murders, if you want to resolve the mystery in the second, Moonflower Murders, both of which also contain an embedded mystery.
Horowitz likes creating and solving complicated puzzles; he enjoys it, and thinks readers will too. Like good puzzles, these are brain challenges.
And, given his writing credits, he's an adept master of language and plot and clues and devices and characters. These books are a kind of tour de force.
Commentary
Then we turned to Jodi Picoult's Wish You Were Here, with the hidden surprise.
Throughout the first section of the novel, Picoult leads readers to believe the fictional reality she has created. Diana, a Sotheby's art conservator, and her surgical resident boyfriend Finn, have been planning a trip to the Galapagos. But when the pandemic hits, Finn must stay at the hospital and Diana takes the trip, only to find herself isolated and remote from the reality she knew. So she creates a reality for herself on the island with characters who inhabit it.
And then, bang-zoom--that bubble bursts--after a series of short, short chapters and Diana finds reality again in a hospital Covid ward. And drags her readers out of that fictional reality into another one, back into the first one she inhabited.
Commentary
The initial fictional reality is true (so to speak). Diana and Finn—Sotheby's and the hospital, their marriage plans, their career goals, but the trip to the Galapagos is not. That is a Covid induced hallucination.
Finn's occasional technology success, his emails to her on the island, are evidence that the fictional reality is trying to break through. And we hear a voice, Finn's, that's unfortunately all too real. He describes, painfully, the realities of healthcare workers. It’s the “real” reality we as readers live in.
Needless to say, Diana is confused about her "true self." Is she really the woman who has planned her life and career in such scrupulous detail, or is she the more liberated character she was on the islands. Is her fictional reality the one in New York, or the one on the Galapagos?
And that's the question of Midnight Library!
Commentary
With Colson Whitehead, and the Underground Railroad, we deviated a bit from this theme.
In that epic novel, the theme dominates; it's the journey itself, the struggle to find freedom.
And he reverses the relationship between imagination and reality. In his novel, the train is real, although we know from history that the Underground Railroad is a metaphor.
So Whitehead takes a literary metaphor and turns it into a reality because the journey, the struggle for freedom, is not a metaphor to the enslaved African Americans who made the journey; it was very much a reality.
'The Words': A Cinematic Run-On Sentence, The Atlantic, Sept 7, 2012
The movie begins with Dennis Quaid (heavy-faced, a bit melancholy) as a famous writer, reading to a rapt, upscale Manhattan audience from his new novel, a novel about a younger writer, played by Bradley Cooper, who marries his college sweetheart (Zoe Saldana) but struggles to find his way into print—his fiction is described as being too "interior," which is not a sin of which Cooper seems likely to be guilty, in this film or any other—until one day he discovers, implausibly tucked into the seam of an ancient second-hand briefcase, a thick yellowed postwar manuscript, brilliant and unpublished, which he retypes, word for word, and submits under his own name, and which makes him an instant literary sensation, feted with awards and further book contracts, until one day, another day, he is approached in the park by an old man, played by Jeremy Irons (decked out in exhausted, exhausting stubble), who is the true author of the novel that Cooper has stolen, and who tells him the tragic story of his own youth in 1940s Paris, and Cooper listens even though he of course knows most of it
'The Words': A Cinematic Run-On Sentence, The Atlantic, Sept 7, 2012
—having published under his own name the novel that was based on it—and we listen, too, perhaps because after being subjected to an excruciating voiceover by Quaid telling Cooper's story ("He loved her. He loved New York. But at night, when the city was finally quiet, he wrote"), it is a relief to be subjected to a marginally less painful voiceover by Irons telling his own story ("It's not over yet. This is where it really gets interesting"), and perhaps also because we're hoping that by now we've spiraled deep enough into the wormhole, penetrating the layers of textual artifice, that we might finally encounter some genuine intrigue—a murder perhaps? a romantic betrayal?
'The Words': A Cinematic Run-On Sentence, The Atlantic, Sept 7, 2012
—but, no, Irons offers only the tale of a lost love and a lost manuscript, a story-within-a-story-within-a-story so slight and inconsequential, like the tiniest of a set of Russian nesting dolls, that we may be forgiven for letting our minds wander toward bedtime and tomorrow's errands, at least until Irons finishes telling Cooper the story, at which point Quaid concludes his reading from the novel in which we've half-forgotten that all the rest is embedded and tells his upscale Manhattan audience "If you want to know the rest of the story, you'll just have to buy the book," which may be the worst advertisement ever, but at least the audience at the book reading gets to leave now, whereas those of us in the theater have to continue watching as Quaid lures a pretty Columbia grad student (Olivia Wilde) back to his airless luxury apartment and she begs him
'The Words': A Cinematic Run-On Sentence, The Atlantic, Sept 7, 2012
—damn you, pretty grad student!—to continue the story, and he does, recounting how after Cooper hears Irons's tale he is ashamed, and cries to his wife over his literary theft, and seeks out Irons in order to make amends, only to learn that Irons has still more personal history to impart, along with the bitter lesson that "We all make our choices in life, the hard thing to do is live with them," a lesson that is presumably supposed to resonate with those of us who've struggled over questions of whether to steal someone else's writing or dissolve our marriages over a lost manuscript, but which also seems like an indictment of anyone who made the choice to watch this particular film, though at least it's a moviegoing experience that is by now mostly over, as Irons is finished telling his story to Cooper which means Quaid is finished telling it to the pretty grad student, and there we are in Quaid's airless apartment and the big, inevitable meta-point about truth and fiction is barreling toward us with all the subtlety of a locomotive,
'The Words': A Cinematic Run-On Sentence, The Atlantic, Sept 7, 2012
but we might as well be tied to the tracks for all we can do about it, so we're left to ponder whether maybe this lazy literary mindfuck, written and directed by Brian Klugman and Lee Sternthal, might have worked better on the printed page than on the big screen, only to conclude that, no, the prose is too dreadful—Italo Calvino minus the Italo Calvino, an incontinent Borges, Philip K. Dick emasculated—and that in any case they didn't choose to make it a novel, they chose to make it a movie, and they have to live with that, and so do we, but not for much longer, because mercifully (and this is the kindest thing I have to say) it is about to end.
Oh, and the movie is titled The Words. Of course.
Additional Reviews
SEE
Roger Ebert's review: "Ms. Found in a Briefcase," (Sept. 5, 2012)
'The Words': Serious Questions, Meet Sappy Romance—NPR (Sept. 6, 2012)