In Matt Haig’s ‘The Life Impossible’ an island adventure in hope awaits

Fans of British writer Matt Haig’s “The Midnight Library” – and they are legion – will be thrilled by “The Life Impossible,” which revisits the question of how to live your best life. The two novels follow a somewhat similar playbook, each chronicling a woman at a low point who discovers life’s infinite possibilities through the help of a supernatural boost. 

Haig’s focus this time is not the choices we make, but our ability to move on from disappointments and losses and keep an open mind, especially in the face of the unexpected and inexplicable. 

Haig, who has been open about his own mental health struggles, offers his readers comfort in spades, along with nuggets of wisdom. His plots involve adventures that transport his characters from darkness to light, and his books are sprinkled with encouraging life lessons.

Die-hard realists might be resistant to the magical, mystical aspects of his novels, but it’s hard not to be charmed by their underlying warmth. His brainy characters’ philosophical discussions of physics and time in “The Midnight Library” and mathematics and the concept of infinity in “The Life Impossible” add heft to his whimsical inventiveness.  

The new novel is framed by an email exchange between the aptly named Grace Winters, a retired, widowed math teacher, and a former student going through a rough time. In response to this young man’s distress, Grace sends him a detailed account of her own depression – which dates back more than three decades, to when her 11-year-old son was hit by a truck in the rain – and how she eventually reignited an enthusiasm for life. 

She knows that the story she tells about her new lease on life strains credulity and requires a willing suspension of disbelief. But that’s part of its lesson. 

Grace’s transformation begins when, after years of a joyless, routine existence in the English Midlands, she receives a letter informing her that she has been left a property on the Spanish island of Ibiza. At first she suspects another con, as she has recently been scammed out of her life savings. But the bequest is from a former colleague, an unhappy music teacher whom she had invited to join her for Christmas back in 1979 and had not seen since. With Grace’s encouragement, Christina had moved on to pursue a musical career abroad, and was apparently forever grateful for Grace’s kindness.

But there’s a mystery behind Christina’s disappearance at sea, and Grace “had always been the type who couldn’t see a question without pursuing an answer. Whatever it took me.” So off she goes, on a one-way ticket to Ibiza, where “lovely young people … [were] dressed like rainbows and bouncy as Labradors.” 

Christina’s house turns out to be a shabby roadside shack, and her life more baffling than Grace could possibly have imagined. Trying to piece together the puzzle, Grace is drawn into her friend’s world, including Christina’s impassioned battle to protect her beloved island from a ruthless developer. 

Despite being warned by the police to stay away, Grace seeks out Christina’s friend Alberto Ribas, a shaggy, once-respected marine biologist who was discredited after publishing a book – “La vida imposible (The Impossible Life)” –  that claimed the unnatural light emitted by the local ancient seagrass meadows was evidence of an extraterrestrial force in the Mediterranean Sea. In her eagerness to learn what happened to Christina, Grace agrees to accompany this older man, who she decides looks more like a castaway than a pirate, on a midnight scuba-diving excursion. It turns out to be life-changing.

A recurring theme in “The Life Impossible” is that “there is more to life than we know.” Grace comments, “Indeed, the willingness to be confused, I now realise, is a prerequisite for a good life. Wanting things to be simple can become a kind of prison … because you end up staying trapped inside how you want things to be rather than embracing how they could be.” 

The novel also celebrates the beauty of nature and the importance of self-forgiveness, along with “two essential qualities … mental fortitude and emotional sympathy.” Delivered in short paragraphs with titles, Haig’s narrative, which picks up speed gradually, involves paranormal mind-reading and telekinetic capabilities and a pitched, swashbuckling battle between good and evil in which the animal kingdom plays a part in saving itself. With its glorious setting and appealingly quirky cast, “The Life Impossible” has terrific cinematic potential. 

It also offers a strong moral, which Grace spells out for her former student: “It seems to me that if you want truth, if you want to lead a full and aware life, you should head towards possibility, towards mystery and movement, towards travel or change, because when you find the universality within that, you find yourself. Your ever-moving self.”