“We are all stardust. The whole universe is inside us.” – Matt Haig, The Life Impossible
Awww, Matt Haig…you almost had me. Almost. I really thought we were going to make it this time, that we would be happy together. Much like that guy (or girl) that all of your friends and family encourage you to marry because he (or she) is so nice and sweet and good, and you keep going back to this person and trying to love them, really love them, but there is just no spark and so you end up walking away much to everyone’s disappointment, Matt Haig is my guy that I really want to love, should love, but the spark just fizzles out. Honestly, the topics he writes about are very much my thing – loss and grief and love and questioning life choices, with a little bit of supernatural thrown in for good measure. As in our previous relationships, called The Midnight Library and This Is How You Stop Time, Matt courted me, bringing all the right things. The Life Impossible’s siren song of a woman trying to find her way out of the hard shell she built around herself due to the bitterness of life rings close to home for me. He sweetened the pot by making the protagonist an older woman and dropped her in a sunny, romantic paradise, tempting me back to him once again. There is, of course, the supernatural element, which we’ll get to, that Matt knows is my kryptonite. I mean, I was all in, he had me…he just couldn’t keep me.
Let’s dive in. In The Life Impossible, Grace is a Brit, a septuagenarian, living in a village in England and grieving the loss of her husband and the years past loss of her young son, a guilt she nurses and refuses to let go. Unexpectedly, Grace receives news that a woman she worked with years ago, Christina, has died and left Grace her home in Ibiza. Curious, since she and Christina had not spoken in years and worked together only briefly, Grace travels to Ibiza intending to sell the home but quietly ends up staying day after day, meeting the people and delving into Christina’s mysterious death during a diving trip. Grace finds a letter from Christina which directs her to certain people and places, and hints that possibly Christina is not dead after all. Grace meets and eventually befriends Alberto, an author and friend of Christina’s, who seems to have the answers around Christina’s disappearance. Hesitantly, Grace accompanies Alberto out on the ocean for a diving trip (she’s never had any diving instruction but Alberto gives her a quick lesson – are there quick lessons in diving?) and, in the water, Grace encounters La Presencia (the presence), a surging ball of light that reaches out to her underwater. Grace wakes up in the hospital, with more questions than answers, since she can now read people’s minds and know things she never knew before like speaking and understanding languages, communicating with animals, or having the ability to play the piano. Turns out, La Presencia is an alien life form, and Christina had been touched by the same life form and had made her living telling fortunes due to this new gift before she disappeared. Christina’s “gift” made her aware that someone was trying to kill her and she needed to skedaddle. La Presencia became her savior, and, in turn, used Christina to call to Grace to become its new vessel.
Y’all, that’s not even the part that turned me away. I’m down with aliens. I’ve driven through the desert to Area 51 and taken pictures at the gate. I love Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. – I’m all about that. I really thought we were going down a story filled with how Grace used this new home and new gift to heal herself from her grief and help heal others, because I’m going through that myself, and I want to see someone come through on the other side. I was rooting for Grace to find a new and whole life in Ibiza, and that does happen in a way, but here’s where the story takes a turn. This alien life force, Grace’s gift, and Christina’s disappearance are all tied to the ecosystem in Ibiza and an overarching theme of saving the planet from mankind. The second half of the story becomes a love letter to environmentalism, embroiling Grace and Alberto and Alberto’s daughter, Marta, in a battle with a hotel company intent on building in areas that will be detrimental to the flora and fauna and wildlife in Ibiza. Grace becomes Captain Planet for the island and really, the second half of the book loses me in that regard. It’s not the turn I hoped it would take, but there are still insights for the reader to appreciate along the way on the themes of loss and lonliness. At one point, Alberto laments, “There is a whale in the ocean…the world’s loneliest whale because no other whale understands calls of that frequency.” The blue whale, whom Alberto calls the Barry White of the ocean, is constantly looking for another blue whale who can hear its frequency much like lonely people move through their lives searching for just the right person to understand their unique vibe, and you don’t always find your person, or, when you do, sometimes you don’t get to keep them for long enough. At one point, Alberto has a video of Christina that she recorded for Grace, where Christina encourages her hope for her grieving friend. “‘I want you to live. I want you to let go of your past and live.’” Isn’t that we all want for ourselves and each other? Grace later muses, “It’s bittersweet to be so present when so many people I care about are absent…but that is how we beat death. We beat death by living while we are here.”
The bigger takeaways of the story are the small realizations of how we close ourselves away in our sorrow, how we forget to live and be grateful for life, and living in the moment even with so much unknown in the future. Would we all like to have the gift of foretelling that befalls Grace? I don’t know. Sometimes I think yes, sometimes I think no. I hate spoilers in stories and actively avoid them, but I hate the unknown in real life. Haig sums up that same sentiment through Grace as she contemplates spoilers in stories saying, “…the idea that if we know what’s about to happen, it takes the enjoyment from it. It’s so strange that we don’t want spoilers in our stories, but we seek them in our lives.” Everyone will be born and everyone will die, but not everyone will live. “There is always an unknown variable, and that unknown variable is often yourself. Embrace the mystery…enjoy the not knowing…”
I want to be clear. I don’t think Haig is a poor writer. On the contrary, he’s a great writer with a gift for words. I don’t dislike any of Haig’s books, I just never love them like I hope I will. I guess I just greatly underappreciate the twists his storytelling takes during the course of a novel. The ideas are great and the storylines start strong, they just end up falling flat for me. Lots of people love him, so do please try Haig for yourself. He and I don’t want the same things in our fictional journeys. He’s a great guy, he’s just not my guy.
P.S. – I listened to the audio which is read by one of my favorite people, the divine Joanna Lumley of Absolutely Fabulous fame! It’s worth trying the audio just for that!