The Life Impossible by Matt Haig

The Life Impossible, newest novel by New York Times best-selling author Matt Haig, is a thought-provoking read and compelling page-turner. When a grieving widow in England inherits a house in Ibiza from a friend she barely knew, her curiosity about her friend’s last wishes draws her to the island and compels her to consider the magical possibilities of the Mediterranean’s seagrass meadows, opening herself up to a new life.

A Chance Inheritance

Grace Winters by her own admission is living “the most boring life in the universe.” A retired math teacher from the Midlands of England, the seventy-two-year-old widow lost both her husband and dog four years ago but she’d already lost “her entire meaning and purpose” with the accidental death of her young son Daniel thirty years earlier. Suffering from anhedonia — inability to feel any pleasure in her life — she is also “in a bit of a pickle with money.” Out of the blue she gets a letter from a solicitor’s office, informing her she’s inherited a property in Ibiza, Spain, bequeathed by old friend and former teaching colleague Christina van der Berg for “an act of kindness long ago.”

Grace can’t imagine leaving Lincolnshire but mostly she can’t make sense of the gift. She helped Christina through a rough patch one Christmas but that was decades ago.  Christina’s will has only recently been changed to make Grace beneficiary and the details of Christina’s death — or is it just a disappearance? — demand sorting out. Math teacher that Grace is, “the value of the unknown variable must be found.” She’s off to Ibiza with a one-way ticket.

“The Kind of Truth That Heals”

Ibiza is greener than Grace expected, hot and dry too, but with dense pine-covered hills and villas with “bright pink and magenta clusters of bougainvillea flowers spilling over walls.” Picturing her inheritance to be as pretty, Grace arrives at “quite possibly the least attractive property on the whole of Ibiza … a small white box of a house, existing where it did for no real reason at all.“ Amidst books and photographs Christina has left Grace a letter that offers a to-do list but little more. “You have to trust me, because if I explained how I know that you are the right person you would think I was insane. And besides, you will find out in due course.”

Grace struggles, realizing her grief is no less in a new place. While she notes the many faces of Ibiza — perfect for parties, yachts, hippies and even dog-walking locals — she doesn’t fit in. “There was seemingly an Ibiza for everyone, except lonely grieving widows.” At a low point she connects with Alberto Ribas, Christina’s crazy friend who runs a scuba shop. Alberto takes Grace to the legendary rock of Es Vedrà, where they dive together to the seagrass meadow, “oldest living organism on Earth.” There she is immediately affected by La Presencia, a shapeshifting phosphorescent sphere of blue light that seeks her out and changes her for good, as Christina predicted. “It tells you things in your dreams, things you need to hear. The dreams are the most vivid you have ever known. And they are filled with the kind of truth that heals…” Grace starts to heal, ready to confront an unscrupulous developer out to alter the fragile ecosystem around Es Vedrà forever.

Mathematics and Magic

Grace sees math everywhere, particularly in “the recurring mathematics of the natural world. The Fibonacci spirals found in whirlpools and pinecones and created by humpback whales in Antarctica to capture prey.” Her heroes are Euclid, father of geometry, Georg Cantor, who suggested infinity came in different sizes, and Pythagoras who believes math explains everything. She thinks the same, even when dancing.  “It is often said about music that it is the joy people feel when they are counting without realizing they are counting … as I … scanned the crowd — the collective euphoria of experiencing mathematical harmony in an imperfect world. Euclid would have loved dancing at Amnesia, I was sure of it.”

The magic Haig presents in a real-life setting engages the what-if tendency in the reader. You want it to be true. As Grace suggests, “…there is more to life than we know. And there is more to our minds than we realize.” Haig furthers the case with mention of a real-life 2011 study done by Cornell University that shows how “precognition and telepathy are measurable in a lab setting … Our silent thoughts are not contained in our minds any more than light is contained in a lightbulb.”

The Life Impossible is beautifully written and not just for devotees of magical realism. Grace Winters is one of those iconic characters who comes into your head and stays there, for her strength, humor and quirky mathematical views of absolutely everything; she will make your day.