Twilight - Matt's View

Twilight. A book which drives 14-year-old girls crazy. After seeing a number of my students unusually engrossed in Stephenie Meyer’s books last year, and having heard a great deal of hilarious bitching about the novels, I decided to read the first book in the series and see what it was like. After all if it’s getting kids reading I should be all for it, right?

It turns out I am not a teenage girl. Wish fulfilment prose about dreamy vampires with topaz eyes doesn’t really do it for me. It also seems that my teenage boy mentality is not so much gone forever as buried beneath layers of age and happiness. Reading this book helped me uncover depths of resentment and frustration I no longer knew I had.

You probably know the story. A terribly ‘ordinary’ girl who is clumsy and doesn’t have a tan moves to OMG a small town and has to go to school where OMG there’s a hunky vampire who’s megabeautiful but a total snob and OMG like every boy at the school totally thinks she’s hot and falls in love with her and wants to ask her to the prom but oh noes the pretty vampire boy doesn’t talk to her so it’s like totally terrible and she gets really sad but then the oh-so-pretty vampire boy talks to her and he’s like totally amazing and she falls in love with him but boys keep asking her out and she has to fob them off on her uglier friends who are really jealous of her.

Then some rapists/muggers show up, she goes to a beach party, mopes around a bit, and goes on a date with the hunky but oh so mysterious constantly-lopsided-grinning vampire guy.

That’s about 350 pages of the book.

At the end there’s a bit of a plot, with backgrounds for the vampire characters that are reasonably interesting and some daft action stuff. Then it ends at prom.

I didn’t find this book hard to read in terms of prose. Meyer doesn’t handle expression of chronology well, throwing ‘tomorrow’ and ‘yesterday’ into past tense writing in a cavalier way. I found it irked me every time the narrator said something like “Two weeks passed and I was going to the shops tomorrow.” Tomorrow is the day after *today*, as in the day after the narrative voice is telling the story. Not the day after the day you’re up to in your at times incoherent narrative. If I told you “I was diagnosed with a tumour a year ago and surgery was tomorrow” you’d probably assume I was a) not a native speaker of English and b) soon to have surgery.

Other than this minor grammatical irritation Meyer’s writing is very easy to read, except for the fact that ALMOST NOTHING HAPPENS FOR HUNDREDS OF PAGES. Except for boys falling in love with Bella, our heroine. Of course non-gorgeous-vampire boys are waaaay beneath the ordinary but oddly-attractive-to-every-male-character-except-her-father Bella. It’s a great burden to her, and causes her to compare friendly, apparently normal boys to annoying dogs because they have to audacity to try to talk to her. Apparently my lonely teenage years of not being a demi-god with marble skin and gooey topaz eyes have left me with the lingering sense that a character who is constantly thinking about how annoying boys are for doing terrible things like showing her where a class is or talking to her, is on some level a bitch. The fact that she also dismisses other females as “a girl with braces and a bad perm” for example is a neat shorthand for “I’m really incredibly hot and all the other girls are nowhere near as pretty as me.”

Did I mention that the wish fulfilment aspect of the novel didn’t really do anything for me?

I think it was a bad sign when the characters I identified with were Chess-Club-Erik and Golden Retriever Mike, two characters who were clearly not going to be in the story much and were both hugely looked down on by the narrator. It kinda positioned me outside the main story as a reader and alienated me when Bella whined about them.

So, before this gets too much longer, my overall opinion of the book. It’s long and not much happens. The end is OK. The main character is annoying, stuck up, and frustratingly mopey. The writing is easy to read as it is very conversational in style, but it’s littered with tense errors around time.

I can see why people, especially teenage girls, like it, but I am not going to read any more of the books. I might well watch the movies, in the hope that some of the pacing issues in the book might have been amended. I will recommend the book to teen girls who aren’t confident readers, since it does appear to be highly addictive to its target audience.

To finish, a quote from Fry and Laurie. “It’s just balls, it’s absolute balls!”