(courtesy Allen & Unwin Book Publishers)
As you gaze upon the twisted vista of the current world, it’s all too easy to feel that there is nothing good or magical left anywhere for us to discover.
Driven out by neoliberalism and the ceaseless quest for more, more, more, whether it’s profits or the spoils of war, the idea that there is something Other out there, something transformational and different, feels like an impossible call, as is the sense that we can change the trajectory of 21st century life and claw back something natural from the morass of human-centric chaos currently being visited upon our lives and the environment.
But if you’re on that cusp of giving into the hopelessness that comes all too easily these days from 24/7 news tabloidism and ceaseless social media opinionating, you may find cause for some kind of inspiration in The Life Impossible by Matt Haig, the follow-up to this bestselling mysteries and joys of The Midnight Library.
This remarkable, if somewhat overwrought at times read, takes a retired septuagenerian maths teacher named Grace from England, who has never really escaped the trauma and grief of her son’s untimely death some three decades or so earlier, to the quite unlikely surrounds of Ibiza where she takes up occupancy in a house bequeathed to her by Christina, a woman to whom she showed great kindness way back in the day.
‘Yes. There are good stories and bad stories. Years and years ago there was a hermit who lived there. In a cave. A religious man. A priest. He wrote about lights he saw in the water. Lights that lit up the whole sea. And since then, they have been seen at other times. They nearly caused a plane crash once … And now the rock gives off a strange vibe. It feels scary sometimes. I always feel something is there. Inside it.’
It was quite a dramatic conversation to be having in a supermarket. I [Grace] tried to be polite. ‘Oh well, it’s an interesting island.’
Hardly friends, but connected by this one transformative act of pay-it-forward kindness, these two women resume their connection, albeit at a great remove – Christina is believed to have drowned, leaving her modest home, an estranged daughter and Grace’s unexpected inheritance behind – and it’s their tenuous relationship that powers the magically realist plot of The Life Impossible.
If you have read any of Haig’s wondrously involving, in-love-with-life books, you will be well aware that the author does not see life simply in the flesh-and-blood building blocks of pragmatic, modern-day life.
For Haig, there is magic, real, amazing magic in the most unlikely of circumstances, which is why Grace, who arrives on Ibiza feels as if her life has reached its natural end and has nothing with which to surprise or delight her anymore (she is weighed down by guilt and loss) suddenly discovers on this most commercially-driven of islands something that challenges her assumptions so profoundly that she has no choice but to open herself up to another way of thinking … and living.
This takes the form of a weird empowerment that comes after a crackpot ageing local diver and scorned scientist, Alberto Ribas, exposes Grace to a strange glowing power that resides beneath the waves (he believes aliens dwell in the waters off Ibiza and have taken up residence in a ball of light known as La Prescenscia).
While Grace is supremely cynical, and in many ways, stays that way – she is the Scully to Ribas’s Mulder – she is possessed in the most magical of ways by a power that allows her to read other people’s thoughts, move objects and even smash tanks to set lobsters free at seafood restaurants.
No more can really be said about the changes the glowing ball of light makes to Grace without giving too much of the plot of The Life Impossible, but suffice to say, Grace becomes someone else entirely, but also not at the same time, and rather than turn her into sort of weirdly transformed being (think Lucy, a 2014 movie where Scarlet Johansson’s characters becomes someone wholly new and creepily different), she simply becomes a better, more healed version of herself.
It’s this renewed and changed Grace that becomes the engines of growth in the final two-thirds or so of The Life Impossible which sees her become surrounded by a diverse found family as she takes on a monumental fight that only she and the people familiar with La Presencia can possibly win.
While in many ways, The Life Impossible is an empoweringly inspirational tale that combats the world weariness we all feel in increasing measure in this day and age, it also feels more than a little over-the-top.
Not so much, interestingly enough, because of the magical realism that increasingly takes over the story, but because the narrative doesn’t entirely harness either its premise or its characters as sufficiently well as it could.
Often lost too much in New Age-y preachiness and neo-hippie wonderment, The Life Impossible begins to feel less like a story of individual and collective renewal and more like Marvel meets Contact.
Everything suddenly felt very heavy, as if the sky began at my shoulders and had a real weight, and then things began to spin and I [Grace] staggered forward, trying to balance, my eyes on Art’s stare, following the slope of the beach until I was almost at the sea. And that is when I collapsed.
That’s not such a bad thing, and by and large Haig delivers on this meshing of redemptive storytelling with more mystical elements reasonably well, but it’s hard at times to feel any real emotional connection to Grace and the others who possess some pretty impressive powers which they have to bring to bear against a Big Bad of the most extraordinary kind.
This reviewer usually loves as much quirk and idiosyncrasy as you can throw at him, especially when it’s embedded in a robustly emotional tale of raw, broken humanity made anew, but The Life Impossible does ostensibly tick those boxes, and it does bring a reasonable measure of joy to anyone reading it, it doesn’t quite get there in any truly profound sense.
There’s a real of emotional connection or impact in the story strangely enough because it should be the kind of story that knocks it out of the park; but The Life Impossible doesn’t really knit the fantastical and the mundane together quite well enough, leaving you happy to have read it but not really fundamentally changed by it.
Still, if you are looking for a read that challenges ennui and hopelessness, that offers the promise of possibility and second chances with some magical realism thrown in, then The Life Impossible will be a book you’ll enjoy, offering up the sense that there is a sizeable reason why you should get up in the morning, even when the very worst of things have happened to you, and that life, despite all indications, may not be even remotely done with you yet.