THE LIFE IMPOSSIBLE
By Matt Haig
Canongate, Rs 999
Grace Winters, a retired mathematics teacher who lives in the Midlands, Lincolnshire, England, is on the verge of going on an expedition that could hardly be in alignment with her own ideology and way of living. It is 2024 and the 72-year-old Grace has no one to call her own. She lost her son almost 33 years ago in a bicycle accident that she blames herself for every passing day. Her husband’s death completed her web of emptiness. Life was progressing at a pace Grace was accustomed to when she receives a cryptic letter that she initially ignores as a prank or, worse, a scam. Apparently, she has been left a property on the island of Ibiza, Spain, by a certain Christina van der Berg, a name that doesn’t ring a bell for our protagonist. Turns out that the benefactor is Christina Papadakis, a music teacher at the same school where Grace used to teach way back in 1979.
With a house in the Balearic Islands beckoning her, Grace decides to explore, after much debate and trepidation, Spain’s famed archipelago, home to the mystical Es Vedrà (picture) off the coast at Cala d’Hort. According to Greek mythology, this monolithic limestone rock formation, Es Vedrà, is blessed with spiritual energies. Sea nymphs of this island had once lured Odysseus. Tanit, the goddess of fertility, was born on this island, which is also known to be Earth’s third-most magnetic point. Grace decides to go to Ibiza not because she was a legitimate inheritor of a property whose owner was not even a proper acquaintance as revealed during the course of the story but because she wanted to unearth the reason she was picked and what claimed Christina’s life. So instead of a treasure hunt, Grace embarks on a journey that will lead her to find out, confront, and possibly make peace with some of the buried secrets and facts of her own life.
Curiosity always gets the better of the human mind. And Grace’s is a mathematical brain which was faced with a situation, a problem, a hypothesis if you will. She laps it up thinking it would be an adventure that would give much needed pleasure to an ageing body, youthful mind, and an indomitable spirit. What begins as a mission to seek logical explanations for certain events soon opens a road full of plot twists and sharp turns. Grace enters a whirlpool of everything which is far from being logical, natural or even rational.
Along the way, Grace meets people who were Christina’s associations, acquaintances, clients, even family. Alberto Ribas, a marine biologist whom Christina was last seen with, is an obvious suspect but eventually, he turns out to be an entirely different version from Grace’s imagination — prejudice to be precise. Alberto’s book, La vida impossible (Impossible Life), as Grace finds out, was based on his lifelong research on Posidonia oceanica, the seagrass of Ibiza, which he claimed was sustained due to the presence (“La Presencia”) of an ‘abnormal’ light with healing properties. Alberto’s theory suggested that unbeknownst to humankind there was evidence of life forms beneath the Es Vedrà. Discredited by the scientific community and eventually thrown out of the university where he taught, Alberto is labelled an eccentric whose research has no merit or value.
La Presencia — a portal to another planet called Salacia — which heals and emanates spiritual powers, is, in fact, a way for us to seek beyond what we have allowed ourselves to experience. In the garb of fantasy and paranormal phenomena, Matt Haig paints a universe which is well within our reach if only we are willing to see it and embrace it sans reservations.
Es Vedrà, an uninhabited island, is also a capitalist’s dream project. But can ecology and capitalism go hand-in-hand? Today, when climate change is an inescapable reality and oceans are being destroyed by microplastic pollution and the carbon footprint, this book raises important questions regarding the sustenance of both human life and other living organisms sharing our planet. In this context, the clairvoyance of Christina and her abrupt disappearance push Grace to a cause which is much larger than solving the mystery of a person’s possible death or even reconciling with her own past.
In this (not entirely) unbelievable universe of self-sustaining seagrass under the ocean, a shape-shifting blue light, humans with telekinetic powers, powerful mind-readers and more, the best-selling author of The Midnight Library, another fantasy novel about alternative universes, urges us to abandon rigidity or fixed perceptions about life. Reality is what happens to us, not what we believe is normal.