Lately I’ve been dipping into speculative fiction again after a long stretch of reading mostly literary novels. I’ve been especially seeking out books which describe travel between multiple worlds, so I read Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library (2020) and Emily St John Mandel’s Exit Party (2026).
The Midnight Library is interesting. I imagine its unapologetic sincerity will have earned it a few detractors, though I haven’t sought out many reviews. As I read it, I considered that perhaps it’s best viewed through the lens of a fictionalised personal development book, rather than straightforward fiction. It felt didactic throughout and I was rarely surprised by the turns it took in its journeys through Nora’s possible lives. However, the self-help side of the book did actually help me, even if it didn’t fully satisfy in literary terms. I pictured myself dropping into my current life from an objectively better one, and was able to use that perspective to come up with ways in which I am actually proud of the way I live now.
This is something I’ve always loved about speculative fiction. Thoughtfully deployed fantastical elements provide a framing for real-world problems that allows you to renegotiate these from a novel and invigorating perspective. At its best, speculative fiction does this without feeling as prescriptive as Haig’s nonetheless admirable book. Two examples of novels I often reread for this exact reason are Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi (2020) and China Miéville’s The City & the City (2009). Whenever I read either one, I find myself going out into the world and see it as if it’s brand new, rich and strange, its wilfully-unseen elements suddenly aglow, undeniable. This is what I need the most from fiction of any kind.
In Exit Party, Mandel does this framing work explicitly. PTSD is timeline corruption (p277), she writes, when describing Marlowe’s exit from an abusive marriage and consequent inability to sleep. And life, like transport, is just the movement of matter through space, says the same character later on, as she introduces a lecture with a few fundamental definitions (p469.) When life is long enough, it resembles migration: “you become a migrant from another timeline. There’s the world you learn to navigate as you enter adulthood, and then that world slips away from you by degrees, and after a while there’s nothing left of it, but you’re still here” (p250). This last piece, incidentally, is why I’d like to read more novels which delve into the experience not of ageing, as such, but of age — of simply being a consistent sentient entity within an organic form, and the way your experience of time is altered. To me that seems like an extremely particular and profound and rare experience, but one that can’t be accessed (yet) by a writer born in 1979. Mandel’s absorbing novel drops in many quotable and stimulating ideas, but I didn’t always get the sense that the cleverness of these was fully worked out in the story.
The book I read recently that did provide a superb fusion of story and idea was Natasha Pulley’s The Kingdoms (2021). It’s an alternative history and a time travel story, with some mind-bending mechanics that will certainly warrant a reread before too long, but more than any of that it’s a love story. And the thing that makes the love story so effective is that Pulley captures the lived experience of falling in love and doesn’t just reframe it but explores and enhances it with the speculative element of the story. One of the things that makes falling in love so disorientating is that you can experience a profound sense of intimacy and understanding with another person extremely early on — sometimes even immediately — and it will naturally be at odds with your rational experience. Pulley explores this dissonance by giving her time-travel mechanic an element of amnesia and deploying it not just for plot convenience and suspense (though it is very useful for these things!) but also to devastating and beautiful emotional effect. Books don’t usually bring me to tears, but this one got close.
What all these books share is an interrogation of latent potential. The Midnight Library keeps this at a human level, focusing entirely on a single protagonist and rarely considering other characters beyond their significance to her. Exit Party and The Kingdoms expand their reach beyond personal potential to the political — we get to see the same characters exist in worlds where critical political events happened in different ways. Mandel does this in a near-future dystopian society, whereas Pulley places her characters in an alternative history in which the British lost at Trafalgar.
This isn’t to say one approach is better than the other. Miéville’s City exposes the cognitive work each individual needs to do in order to bolster an oppressive regime, simultaneously demonstrating that it’s completely bizarre but also utterly understandable. There’s something deeply Orwellian about this, though Miéville also shares with Bruno Schulz, the Polish author from whom he draws his epigraph, a delight in the surreal nature of urban (dis)organisation. Conversely, Piranesi strikes me as predominantly internalised, revealing a living inner world that contrasts with inexplicable ruins inhabited only by wildlife, not humans and their organisations. The setting, along with the narrator’s anxious and childlike excitement about it, always reminds me of the monumental and uncanny Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, though it also draws a great deal from the classics of portal fantasy and the joy of traversing worlds in the imagination.
I’ve now talked myself into rereading Miéville, Clarke, Schulz, Borges, and probably Pulley as well. I’ll report back when I do, especially if I find that any of my impressions have changed.
