You ever want to tell someone about a book or a movie, but run into the problem that, in relating the best parts, the very crux of the work, you’re going to spoil it for them?
I, personally, hate spoilers for other people — but love them for myself.
What I mean is, I myself love knowing how things end, because I am often too riddled with anxiety, or too tied up in solving the ending before it happens, to actually enjoy the experience of ending up there.
I am one of those people who Stephen King hates — who read the last three pages of a book if they feel they can’t handle waiting to find out how it ends.
And there are countless spoiler websites devoted to ruining the endings of movies, of which I am a devoted patron. I won’t share URLs here because I don’t want to suck any of the joy out of anyone else’s life.
That’s what I mean by hating spoilers for other people. Everyone has the right to enjoy their entertainment however they choose, and so, if you want to find out how something ends as the creator intended — what I like to think of as “the hard way” — you have every right and I will bless your journey with kisses and praise.
I am not, for example, like one of my best friends, who would shout out “Tina wins!” when he discovered someone was caught up in the mania that was Survivor season two, all the way back in 2001. I confess, though, he extracted a giggle from me every time he did that.
I was similarly amused by the “Snape killed Dumbledore!” spoiler trend that emerged on the internet in the wake of the release of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince in 2005, but I did feel badly for those who had to find this key piece of information out via some stupid meme.
Postscript to the above — I heartily apologise if I did in fact ruin either of those IPs for anyone. But, in my defence, you really shouldn’t be rotting your brain with Survivor, and if you don’t know about Snape and Dumbledore, you are either seven years old or have never been on the internet before. (If you are seven, well done on reading this on your own!)
And this is the dilemma I face with Matt Haig’s latest offering The Life Impossible. It is such a good book. But to discuss it in any meaningful way is to ruin it, because all the best parts, all the crucial parts, happen after the surprising, but not unexpected, left turn that happens around a third of the way into the novel. And wow, are there some good parts.
Let me start with what I can share. The Life Impossible is the story of an elderly woman named Grace Winters, a retired maths teacher who lives in Lincolnshire, England.
Grace, who is recently widowed, has spent the past three-plus decades mourning the loss of her only child, who died at the age of 11. She spends her days in the drabbest part of England, whiling away the hours with meaningless tasks in order to keep her mind off the feelings of grief and loss surrounding the deaths of her two closest loved ones.
Grace is fighting her way through some mild physical, and serious mental, health issues, including a severe case of anhedonia, when she receives an out-of-the-blue communication about a former colleague, Christina, whom she hasn’t spoken to in decades.
An act of kindness on Grace’s behalf sets Christina’s life on a brand-new track, a better one, and in gratitude, Christina has bequeathed her house on the Spanish island of Ibiza to Grace.
Christina is also missing, presumed dead, after a suspicious diving incident off the coast of Cala d’Hort, the beach that faces the magnificent islet of Es Vedra.
Grace is obviously confused and a little suspicious, but with life in England increasingly lacking joy or meaning, she decides to at least take a trip to Ibiza to see the house in person.
When in Ibiza, people react to the mention of Christina’s name either with extreme joy or nervousness and it is this contradiction that prompts Grace to go in search of details surrounding Christina’s disappearance.
This leads her straight to Alberto Ribas, the diving instructor who took Christina out into the water on the night she disappeared.
And what Alberto slowly reveals to Grace over the ensuing weeks turns her life, quite literally, upside down.
From this point, I can’t tell you anything about the book’s plot without severe spoilers.
But I will say this — this book exists at the intersection of Tom Robbins’ Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas, Piers Anthony’s Macroscope and Walter Mosley’s Blue Light, and brushes up against HP Lovecraft’s The Colour Out of Space.
Lovecraft’s book is bleak and unsettling, because all of Lovecraft’s books are, but the other three blend an odd mix of large dollops of hope and a tiny bit of despair in with their predominant subject matter to great effect.
This is something that Haig has done in his book and it packs a punch. What he has also done very well is avoided Robbins’ obsession with secondary characters, Anthony’s high-concept, hard sci-fi and Mosley’s dystopianism to bring us a heartfelt and heart-warming tale of one woman’s journey back to the light via decidedly unconventional means.
Grace is a wonderful protagonist, always slightly sad, but very determined, and Alberto provides enough off-kilter emotional counterpoint that one never feels overwhelmed by any one feeling.
And so, a book that is unquestionably a love letter to Ibiza, and has the potential to drift off into self-serving sentimentality, never does. All it does is take you on one hell of a ride, always wondering what’s around the next corner.
The Life Impossible by Matt Haig is published by Canongate.