This will be the title of my review posts. I'll tag them as films, theatre, books, etc. Today, one which is on everyone's lips and which I was at first ashamed to admit I was reading...
"Twilight" by Stephenie Meyer.
Remember The DaVinci Code? Remember how everyone read it because everyone was reading it? Twlight is 2008's equivalent. Harry Potter had a similar quality - I only picked up the first book because of the constant talk about it - however the difference is that Harry Potter was more than just a page turner, and JK Rowling knows the difference between a transitive and an intransitive verb.
The story in a nutshell: Bella moves to a tiny, rainy, isolated town in Washington state call Forks, in a move which mystifies both her mother in Phoenix, and her father with whom she goes to live, not to mention the reader, who is left in the dark for a while as well. Cue all the same old anxieties about coming to a new school, all the classic experiences of entering a brand new class room, meeting brand new people, making friends, enemies, etc. The difference here, which is probably one of the main strengths of the book, is that Bella is not entirely your confident outgoing girl, nor is she entirely your shy awkward type. She straddles both of these types as someone with a lot of self awareness (but not too much for a 17yo mercifully), which makes the attendant insecurities of adolescence something she strives both to own with pride and get on with things in spite of. Bella is in this way a well rounded inherently human character.
Cue the devastatingly beautiful (and he's rarely described as anything else except "devasating," or "beautiful") and naturally highly mysterious Edward. He and his pose of pale skinned blood-drinkers naturally sit far away from everyone else, and it's only because of the cliched "lab partner" device that Bella and Edward are thrown together. Edward however clearly has some issues with Bella. As the story progresses, and Bella becomes more and more obsessed with Edward's unpredictable moods and cryptic hot and cold statements, we learn that his issues with Bella aren't just her waif like appeal and propensity for falling over things - she is his own personal eqivalent of vampire crack cocaine. And for a "vegetarian" vampire this presents a problem. This is about as deep as Edward's "inner turmoil" gets. He wants Bella, but doesn't want to hurt her. He is essentially a cardboard cut-out of every other boy character with a conflict of interests. He behaves predictably, and when his eventual outpouring of truth occurs, it's pretty out of left field. He also doesn't quite behave like a 100 year old vampire should. Very adolescent indeed. He's not a patch on Angel, I'm telling you. His family is by far much more interesting, and charismatic to boot. Thier motivations are clear and make sense. Edward's are just, as I said, predictable. Far from being the perfect man, he is just like all the rest. Conflicted, incapable of expressing what he really feels, and prone to the same old mistakes as almost every other hero of teensploitation romance.
Add to this the fact that all Edward seems to be able to do with his face is narrow his eyes or make them smoulder, and either press his lips together or curl them into a devastatingly beautiful smile. The language and the descriptions are all incredibly simplistic and frequently repetitive. A good editor could have suggested innumerable other ways to describe things, phrase things (you can't "respond" someone for instance, although you can "respond to" them). Some scenes needed much more time spent on them, and other scenes were patently unecessary. Essentially it reads like a piece of fan fiction, and I smell an online writing forum somewhere in its history. Great story, mediocre execution with one or two saving graces.
"Twilight" isn't a terrible book, but it's certainly not fabulous. The story is very sweet, and there are certainly some very exciting moments (the flight from Forks to Phoenix in particular). As I said it IS a page turner, because you want to know how and if this impossible situation will resolve itself, and what complications will arise. In that sense, it is a great story, and I look forward to finding out where it goes in the subsequent books already out on the market. Maybe, like JK, Stephenie Meyer will have learnt something about writing prose and will build on this foundation, shaky though it may be.
I'll comment on the movie after is see it on Sunday with my date!
Moving Day
10 years ago
