Author: Matt Haig
We spend enormous amounts of time wondering whether we made the right choices, but The Midnight Train asks whether we recognized what mattered while we actually had it.
Matt Haig has always been interested in the space between ordinary life and the impossible, and most of his books shift into meaning of life, philosophy of life, and asking what makes us human. In The Midnight Library, he imagined a place where a person could explore lives they might have lived, but in The Midnight Train, he turns the question around and asks what we might understand if we were given another chance to look properly at the life we actually had.
At the center of the story is Wilbur, an elderly man looking back over a long life. Among the memories that matter most are his relationship with Maggie, the great love of his life, and the experiences they shared together, including their honeymoon in Venice. Alongside love come regret, missed opportunities, and the inevitable question of whether things could have been different if he had not chased only business success. Then comes the Midnight Train, which offers Wilbur something impossible: the opportunity to travel back through significant moments in his own past. It is an irresistible idea because almost everyone has imagined doing exactly that: we remember conversations we would handle differently, people we would appreciate more, opportunities we would take, and moments we failed to recognize as important until they were already gone.
Equally, we often live as though the important part of life is somewhere ahead of us: there is always another achievement to reach, another problem to solve, or another stage to arrive at. Only later do we sometimes realize that the moments we were rushing through were life itself. This makes The Midnight Train an interesting companion to The Midnight Library. The earlier novel explored alternative lives and the belief that happiness might exist somewhere along a path we failed to take. The Midnight Train appears to be asking a different question: what if the real challenge is not finding another life but recognizing the value of our own?
Perhaps this is ultimately why stories about second chances remain so powerful. Most of us know we will never receive one in the literal sense: there will be no mysterious train waiting to transport us back to an earlier version of ourselves. But we can change the way we understand what has already happened, and that can alter how we choose to live from this point forward. The most intriguing question raised by The Midnight Train, then, may not be whether we would change our past if we could, but whether we are paying enough attention to our lives while they are still happening.
A lot of food for thought in this book. Highly recommended!
Thank you for reading!