Twilight - Debbie's View

Twilight is in many ways a confusing book for me. I can’t remember being this conflicted about a book since… ever? I thoroughly enjoyed reading Twilight but I have no respect for it. I found it compelling and obsessively read it but I’m all too aware that it is just not as good as it should be. Hmm, I guess that kind of mirrors Edward’s relationship with Bella. Obsessive desire mingled with a smug sense of superiority.

I decided to read it largely because I knew it was a teen vampire story and I like vampire stories on the whole. It is always interesting to see what spins on the vampire mythology the author will create. Besides after witnessing the obsessive behaviour of teen girls who appear to be addicted to the books like they’re the fiction equivalent of crack, I figured there must be something in these books worth checking out.

The problem is that after reading both Twilight and New Moon I find it difficult to put my finger on what exactly it is that makes these books so compelling. They definitely are highly addictive reading. I’ve seen young girls wandering the streets of Kapiti with their head buried in a copy of Twilight hardly aware of the potential hazards of oncoming traffic as they cross the street as though they had been dazzled into a hypnotic trance by a vampire themselves. To be honest, I suffered a fairly similar compulsion myself and nothing much could tear me away from the book once I started, not even severe exhaustion which manages to tear me away from most books at around 10.30 at night these days.

I guess it might be the easiest approach to list the reasons why Twilight shouldn’t be as addictive and enjoyable to read as it is first.

Firstly, the vampire mythology is not very well developed. While there are some interesting titbits about the historical backgrounds of the vampire characters, these are incredibly brief and left until very late in the book. The ‘rules’ of being a vampire in the Twilight world seem to be that you are incredibly awesome in every respect. To me that makes them less interesting. I like the powers to be balanced by some weakness or vulnerability in my vamps. That’s usually the way it works. Vampires might live forever but they are vulnerable to sunlight, or garlic or a stake though the heart. They might have special abilities but they also have to live with the fact that they are monsters. Not so for the Cullen family of vamps in Twilight. For them the only danger in sunlight is that they look even prettier because their skin sparkles like diamonds in direct sunlight. In fact life, or rather undeadness, is rather easy for the Cullens. They live in Forks, a town so rainy and gloomy that there are virtually no days of sunshine so they can wander around amongst humans. The vamps that still look like teens even go to school. Twilight vampires are superstrong, superfast and even have super heightened senses. The only thing that makes them stick out from the humans is that they are incredibly attractive, graceful and beautiful. Just in case you didn’t pick up that the vampires are really good looking, Meyers will repeatedly go on and on about how devastatingly good looking they are again and again.

To add further awesomeness to this bunch of unbelievably pretty and super-powered vamps, some of them have extra individual powers. Edward can read people’s thoughts, Alice gets visions of the future and Jasper has the ability to alter the emotions of people around him. Talk about a sweet deal. Immortality and tonnes of super powers. If I ever get made a vampire, please let it be a Twilight one.

The pretty Cullen vampires live together as a happy and loving family in a lovely old house and when they aren’t busy looking amazingly beautiful, they hunt animals so that they don’t have to hunt and kill humans. They is no consensual bloodsucking from willing human fleshies in the Twilight world. Vampires release a kind of venom when they bite, so anyone they bite is killed. Resisting the urge to hunt and drink humans is difficult for vamps so the Cullens have to practice a lot of restraint to hunt humans, especially some humans who have blood that smells particularly delicious.

Gee, I wonder what would happen if a nice, young girl showed up with the exact delectable flavour of blood that would make her irresistible to Edward?

Enter Bella Swan. She’s really more a portal for teen girls to vicariously enjoy the thrill of being the object of a hunky vamp’s obsession than a character which is odd because the whole story is about her and told from her point of view. Although if I think about Cinderella or Snow White we don’t really ever find out much about their personalities other than that they are pretty, do a lot of housework, and get rather a hard time until they are rescued by their Prince Charming. Bella Swan is really just a fairytale princess for a generation of emo teens from broken homes. She’s a good girl who does her homework and cooks dinner for her dad all the time.

The problem with Bella’s characterisation, or rather lack thereof, is that it remains at the shallow, undeveloped level of a fairy tale for an entire novel (and the sequel as well). A frequent problem with first person narration is that the reader can be confused about the accuracy of what they are told by the narrator. Is something really true or is it distorted by the narrator’s prejudice, bias or modesty?

In Twilight the issue of Bella’s modesty/low self-esteem does impose itself awkwardly on her account of events. She insists that she is ordinary and in fact frequently laments her own average appearance in comparison to the superhuman prettiness of ‘Mr Topaz Eyes’ Edward Cullen, however, that doesn’t seem to stop every male with and without a pulse falling madly in love with her. Surely, after the third guy asks you out to the prom in a couple of days, you might stop going on about how plain you are all the time.

However, the inconsistencies in Bella’s character extend beyond the distortion of her own appearance. There are frequent contradictory references or actions that make her very hard to pin down as a character. We are told she is smart academically as she refers to being in some advanced Biology classes at her old school and she seems to be a voracious reader of literary classics, yet she also seems to be completely obtuse and slow at other times. She seems to be brave and strong in the face of her many near-death experiences yet she completely falls apart of Edward is absent from school for a day. The only thing that is consistent about her character is her clumsiness which does seem to be implausibly extreme. There are only so many times you can have a character trip, drop something or fall over before you start to wonder if they have some kind of disability.

These, however, are minor quibbles and I could easily look past them if there was some sense that Bella developed over the course of the books. The frustrating thing is that she really doesn’t seem to grow up or learn anything in the first two books. Despite learning about a whole other world of vampires and werewolves and nearly dying a multitude of times, she really doesn’t change at all. She never gets past her obsessive and childish dependence on Edward, and her relationship with him doesn’t seem to really hang on anything deeper than that he is perfect and beautiful.

To be fair, Edward doesn’t really develop either. While there are numerous lengthy passages describing his extraordinary physical attributes, you never really have a sense of him having that much of a personality. His interactions with Bella aren’t particularly romantic. At first he oscillates between friendly and hostile but once their mutual fascination with each other is discovered, their relationship becomes quite twisted. Edward then reveals that he was obsessively stalking Bella the whole time and that he has to show tremendous restraint not to rip her throat out which should be off-putting to a young girl surely? But I didn’t find this element as unappealing as the blatant superiority complex that he displays during their romance. Edward’s behaviour towards Bella is really rather domineering and condescending. He mocks her when she fails to believe she is worthy of him and insists on showing off just how powerful and dangerous he is every time she claims that she isn’t afraid of him. He disapproves of her putting herself in any danger even though he considers himself the biggest threat to her life and yet he still creeps into her bedroom at night and really for someone as terminally clumsy as Bella even walking across a flat stretch of road is fraught with danger. Edward spends so much talk talking down to her and disapproving of everything that you could be mistaken for thinking she was going out with her curmudgeonly old grandfather rather than a superhot vampire.

Of course this is somewhat missing the point. Bella and Edward aren’t supposed to reflect a realistic or even a charmingly idealistic view of teen love. There relationship is devoid of the deeper understanding, friendship, and humour that you might expect in a romance. Interestingly, Meyer does actually develop a far more touching relationship between Jacob and Bella in the second book where you do get a sense that they genuinely respect, understand and care about each other. Of course that’s destroyed soon enough so Bella can chase after Edward again. After all, Bella can’t be with a guy who actually makes her happy when she’s around him. That is not the kind of great love that sells books.

Edward and Bella are stuck, at least in the first two books, in the perpetual hold of tragic love. Part of the thrall of these books is that they deliver the angst of two star-crossed lovers who are doomed to be dangerously and obsessively in love against their better judgement (yes, Meyer does repeatedly allude to the Romeo and Juliet comparisons). They are so compulsively fixated on each other that they never really get a chance to know each other like real people.

So why are so many people so into these books? On the cynical hand, they offer up perfectly executed wish fulfilment. Bella is so shallowly defined that a reader can effortlessly project themselves onto her. The books don’t just give you the thrill of having a dangerous and obsessive romance with a dashing vampire, it’s the complete high school girl fantasy where every unpleasant thing has the perfect explanation. The boy you’re in love with not only reciprocates your affections but he never even notices other girls. Not only does he reject all other girls, even the superhot vampire girl his parents tried to set him up with now, but he has never liked another girl. Ever. Not in the hundred years he’s been around. Those girls at school who don’t like you and whisper mean things about you, it’s just because they’re jealous of you because all the boys like you. The hot boy you have a crush on acts weird, sometimes he’s nice then there’s times he glares at you or ignores you. It’s OK. He’s just acting like that because he’s deeply in love with you and wants to drink your blood so badly.

Heck, even I fell for the identifying with Bella when I started reading the books. Her feelings of awkwardness and alienation are those which most of us have felt at some time in our lives. Bella’s sense of not fitting in, of being the outsider, of being uniquely and painfully alone are actually the very thing that make her the perfect ‘everygirl’ that everyone can relate to.

Another reason why these books are so compelling and popular I suspect has to do with the strength of Meyer’s emotional and evocative prose. While it is easy to condemn her writing - heck, even Stephen King has slammed her work - there is some talent there. Yes, there are numerous technical errors. She does put full stops in the middle of her similes. Sometimes the sentences are poorly constructed. Maybe she does start more sentences with the word ‘like’ than the average fifteen year old cheerleader and maybe she doesn’t follow the usual conventions of storytelling such as having your main plotline start before the last hundred pages of the book.

What she does do with extraordinary effectiveness is create a haunting and passionate recreation of the extremes of teen love. Everything is exaggerated in this world from the overblown hyperboles with which Edward’s exquisite looks are described to Bella’s overstated sense of inadequacy and desolation when Edward isn’t around. However, the overblown language is part of what actually makes you believe in the exaggerated world and the characters. Meyer is on some level giving us a story we can believe in. She isn’t capturing a true or real depiction of modern teenage girls, certainly not a very empowered one, nor does she really create a believable, three dimensional set of vampires for her world. In fact many aspects of the book strike you as very unrealistic. Meyer’s depiction of technology in a book that was first published in 2005 is so dated that you could make the mistake of thinking the author was Amish rather than Mormon.

The ‘realism’ that she does do exceedingly well is the emotional truth of her characters. Bella’s thoughts and experiences echo the magnified feelings that you have as a teenage girl going through the torment of first love. Most of us don’t actually collapse entirely as functioning human beings when our ‘true loves’ leave us but we feel like we do. The melodramatic sentiments that Bella and Edward continually express are recognisable. The extreme ecstasy she feels when she’s with him and belief that her life is nothing without him are commonly experienced emotions.

Many of the descriptions are also well crafted. There are many passages where the town of Forks is described with haunting beauty and the grey, dreary town with its foreboding wildness encroaching in on it is an atmospheric and stunning backdrop to the angst and danger-ridden drama of the story.

Ultimately, I don’t really know what made this book so compelling for me. There isn’t really any logic to why I liked it. Its flaws probably outweigh its merits. While there are some lovely passages with poetic prose and I was easily able to slip into the evocative and emotional world Meyer creates, looking back on the book I’m not really sure why it had me so enthralled.

Maybe the book is another example of the unreasonable nature of teen crushes. It’s never very clear what the reason for the attraction is but there is a great deal of pleasure in surrendering to the irrational desire, allowing the consuming passion to override your common sense and good taste.

It’s only when you reflect back on the object of your desire with the wiser eyes of an adult that you start to wonder why you were so obsessed and entranced with such an unworthy object.