Welcome friend! I loved The Midnight Library. Nora’s story of visiting other versions of her life was thought-provoking and insightful to me. The Midnight Train features Nora as someone Wilbur, the main character in the book, is learning piano from. In Matt Haig’s words, “The Midnight Library was a library between life and death. This is a train through life after death.”
Nora, in her story, was able to see all the lives she could have gone on to have. She learnt that she had agency. Nora was late-twenties/early thirties when she went to the Midnight Library. Wilbur is quite old. He has lived a long life but as he looks back at it on the Midnight Train, there aren’t many parts of his life that he wants to think about.
Let’s take a look at what the book is about and then read on for my thoughts.
When your life flashes before your eyes, what will matter most?
For Wilbur it was his time with Maggie, the love of his life. Their honeymoon in Venice. Before he threw it all away.
Years later, on the brink of his own death, a train arrives. It can take Wilbur back in time. To relive his most important moments. Soon he realises just how much he would have changed…
An adventure through time, The Midnight Train is a story of love and second chances, from the world of The Midnight Library.
The Midnight Train – Review
I wanted to read The Midnight Train because it was marketed as a sequel to The Midnight Library but in the first couple chapters, I realized that the idea of visiting other lives appeals to me more than revisiting a lived life, especially with a protagonist like Wilbur who is full of regret.
I stuck around because Matt Haig writes good stories and I wanted to give him a fair shot, knowing well that his writing has been immersive and interesting to me in the past.
Meeting Wilbur
Wilbur had a tough childhood. His father passed away before he was born. He had an older brother, Dougie, who was constantly in trouble for one thing or another. His mother was barely making ends meet. He loved books and there was a bookstore in his neighbourhood where he went to read. There was a girl he liked who he eventually married. He had friends who eventually helped him thrive in his business and he grew up to be the CEO of a big bookstore chain.
But he neglected his relationships and emotional wellbeing. He equated success to a happy life and by the time I met Wilbur, he had been alone long enough that he knew he had done his life wrong.
Getting on the Midnight Train was a very hard exercise for him. His laundry list of regrets annoyed me a lot. For a good chunk of the book, he is a whiny person. When he sees his younger self, he is mad at himself for not doing things differently. He blames himself for not getting things right and knows that it is too late now to change anything.
I found myself critiquing Wilbur’s actions the same way he was critiquing his past selves. It’s ironic because he doesn’t know any better either.
The book started to get better at about 30%. Wilbur’s family situation became clearer, particularly after Dougie’s accident and death. Dougie was a huge part of how Wilbur understood the world and himself. Wilbur had already decided to go to college but after Dougie’s death, he didn’t end up going. Seeing these pieces of his life come together made me understand Wilbur more.
And that became one of the most interesting parts of the book for me: I was watching one person’s entire life unfold. I had access to information that Wilbur himself didn’t have when he was living those moments. I could see the consequences of choices alongside the person who made them.
Watching a Life Unfold
Wilbur has guidance. The Midnight Train has rules, and to step beyond these rules would mean the end will not come and he might get stuck in this in-between space between life and death.
Except, of course, Wilbur does things he isn’t supposed to do.
He talks to his past selves and shows them the consequences their actions led to. At one point, there are three Wilburs: two watching the third. It is exactly the kind of strange thing you would expect from a story about travelling through your own memories.
But what stayed with me was the experience of watching one person’s entire life and realizing how impossible it is to judge any single decision in isolation.
Present-day Wilbur knows how everything turned out. His younger selves don’t. I knew how everything turned out too. And yet, watching the circumstances around each decision unfold made it increasingly difficult to judge the younger Wilbur for making choices that seemed so obvious in hindsight.
That was perhaps the biggest shift for me. I started the book judging Wilbur for judging himself. Eventually, I understood him. I don’t see it as my place to forgive Wilbur. His life has been as it has been. But I could finally see how all the pieces had brought him to that point.
Skip this section if you don’t want spoilers
In the end, Wilbur disrupts the cycle of the train and finds himself back to the time in his life just before he had expanded his bookstore business. There is happiness in getting another shot at this life, even though that second chance was never guaranteed.
I wish I had written down how I felt about this when I finished the book because I don’t quite remember anymore. I want to say that Wilbur had accepted himself as the person who lived the life he had lived, and that this second chance might allow him to live more intentionally. Self-compassion is a hard skill and to be able to accept that the choices he regrets weren’t made by villainous versions of himself is a gift. Maybe the realization would have been more powerful without the do-over.
The Midnight Train is a story of self-acceptance. Of finally getting past the self-judgment and sadness of wrong choices made. Similar to Nora’s story in The Midnight Library, it is about seeing the agency Wilbur always had: the moments when he could have chosen kindness and come closer to his family rather than anger that led to distance and separation.
I will not be reading The Midnight Train again but I am glad to have experienced it once. The Midnight Library, however, does make my reread list. If you have read both books, which one did you like more?
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