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Summary
Nora finds herself standing outside. She notices that the air feels clean and crisp and it’s no longer raining. Nora notices a sign for a trivia night at The Three Horseshoes pub, written in her own handwriting. She realizes she’s in the English countryside, standing in front of the pub that Dan always dreamed of opening. It’s one minute after midnight.
Nora feels disoriented and strange because she was just in her root life. She wonders how she ended up here. People call her by her name and talk to her as though they are familiar with her, but Nora doesn’t know who any of them are. She remembers when Dan first mentioned the pub, on a trip the two of them had taken to Paris. She wonders if this is the life for her, and she feels both apprehensive and hopeful.
Nora goes into the pub and notices that it’s warm, quiet, and quaintly decorated. A cat comes to greet her, a Burmese who is different than the ginger cat in her root life but also named Voltaire. She calls the cat Volts Number Two and asks the cat if everyone in this life is happy.
In every conversation she has with people she encounters, Nora feels as though she’s a spy who is about to have her cover blown. She navigates these conversations carefully, trying to guess what to say. Dan emerges and Nora notices that he looks different. He’s wearing a Jaws T-shirt, he no longer has a beard, and he looks older, with more wrinkles on his face. He talks casually about the business of the pub, including the money troubles they’re having, and she pretends to know what’s going on. They begin to talk about the pub’s quiz night, and Nora knows the highest mountain in the Karakoram mountain range, which seems to put Dan off because he does not.
Nora begins to remember the negative aspects of their relationship that she’d forgotten about in her root life. She remembers that he often made fun of other people, he listened to annoying podcasts, and he gargled too loudly with mouthwash. She tries to counter these traits with his positive attributes, such as looking after her mother when she was sick and talking to people experiencing homelessness. But the negative memories persist, and she remembers more serious ones, such as how unsupportive Dan was of her music career and how integral he was in her leaving The Labyrinths. She receives a text message from her best friend Izzy and is happy that their relationship is better in this life.
Alone in their home together above the pub, she notices a photograph of her wedding to Dan and a framed poster of a Ryan Bailey movie. She notices, too, that their home is expensively furnished despite money troubles. When she and Dan are alone at home together, they begin to argue, and it comes out that they are trying to have a baby and that Dan had an affair. Nora confronts him, saying he doesn’t seem to love her anymore and that maybe their relationship had run its course already. Fully disappointed in this version of her life, she returns to the Midnight Library.
Analysis
In her first visit to a different version of her life, Nora begins to see the truth in the adage that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Here, Nora is living an entirely different life, living in the country instead of the city, married to the man she’d left in her root life, and running a pub instead of working in a record store. She feels a stirring of hope at the newness and wonders if she is visiting a life where she can be happy. However, less than a half-hour into her visit to the pub life, she begins to sense that these differences don’t equate to a fundamentally different life. In fact, here she sees with clear eyes what she couldn’t in her root life: that she left Dan for good reasons. He subtly belittles her, resents her talents, and squashes her dreams. She recognizes that, in both lives, the relationship had run its course, and by staying in the relationship longer in the pub life, the fundamental problems between the two of them only intensified. This suggests that many of the specifics of her life are just window dressing, and by seeing what happens when she changes the window dressing, she can peer directly into what’s most true in her life.
This chapter on the pub life also explores the theme of the derailing power of other people’s dreams. Throughout her life, Nora is often distracted from what she truly wants by the intense wishes of others. Here, in this life, she leaves behind her dream of being in a rock band to pursue Dan’s dream of owning a pub. What’s more, it was her brother’s dream to be in a rock band, and before that, her father’s dream for Nora to swim. This suggests that throughout her life, Nora has often given herself over to the dreams of the men she loves. In her root life, she walked away from all three of these dreams: from swimming, music, and Dan’s pub. Each time she did, she blamed herself for leaving and marked her decision as a personal failing. However, this visit reveals that her struggles weren’t caused by leaving Dan or not pursuing the pub life but by living her life according to other people’s dreams.
This chapter also explores the significance of Nora’s watch, which symbolizes the mysterious nature of time. In the Midnight Library, Nora’s watch has stopped, suggesting that she is in a place outside of time, where her experiences can’t be understood in terms of conventional chronology. Nora and Mrs. Elm spend hours in the library together, and yet for the majority of the time, Nora’s watch doesn’t move at all. Here, as she slides into the pub life, she notices that her watch is different than the one she wears in her root life and that it is moving again. In this life, her watch is analog instead of digital, suggesting that this life in the country hews more closely to a time when life itself was less dominated by technology. This also suggests that time moves differently in each of the lives she slides into.
