Eclipse, Ch. 23-Epilogue

Only a few chapters left. Let’s begin.

Chapter 23. Monster

Jacob and Edward antagonize each other some more. Bella frets about this, and Jacob manipulates her into letting him kiss her. Well, at least this time the violence was only emotional.

Chapter 24. Snap Decision

After Jacob leaves, Bella and Edward have another–yet another–”do you really love me?” moment. As far as I’m concerned we exhausted all the potential of that line of discussion way back in Twilight, but Stephenie Meyer apparently disagrees. I’m starting to think she’s the Ayn Rand of romance novels; goodness knows reading the Twilight series is a lot like reading an alternate universe version of Atlas Shrugged where the characters endlessly discuss love instead of economics. I’m just waiting for Bella to start running around trying to find out why all her friends are becoming vampires, and people around her only shrug and say, “Who is Edward Cullen?”

Anyway, while they’re beating this dead horse, the battle starts up. In the tradition of all Twilight-series climaxes, the action happens off screen. In this case Edward uses his mind-reading abilites on their werewolf escort, who is in turn using his mind-reading abilities on the rest of the pack. At one point Edward freaks out and goes silent, but he quickly covers it up. Boy, what could that possibly indicate? A moment later, he picks up Victoria; apparently she decided to follow his scent on the assumption that he would e near Bella. None of them realize it at the time, but this means Bella’s selfishness really came back to haunt her: if she’d just let Edward fight with everyone else, Victoria’s plan would have been shot and Bella’s friends would have had one or two extra fighters. Nice job planning everything, hero.

Victoria shows up, and she brought another vampire as backup. Edward puts his telepathic abilities to good use and tries to persuade the extra to betray Victoria. It almost works, but Victoria reasserts plot control and prepares to attack Bella. Fortunately for Bella, and unfortunately for all of us rooting for Victoria, a werewolf comes out of nowhere and takes out the redshirt vampire. Edward now begins to mentally spar with Victoria in preparation for his real attack. Desperate to give her friends any advantage she can, Bella cuts herself with a piece of rock. This is actually a good idea, and it’s nice to be reminded that this series isn’t totally unredeemable.

Anyway, Bella’s blood has exactly the desired effect, and Victoria is distracted long enough to be beheaded by Edward. So it goes.

Chapter 25. Mirror

While Bella and Edward have another “romantic” conversation, werewolf-Seth gets a vampire roast going. Suddenly Edward gets a message over werewolf proxy that Jacob has been severely injured by one of the newborn vampires. Oh, and the Volturi have arrived. Good times!

Bella and Edward join up with the rest of the Cullens. It turns out they captured one of the newborns and have offered to let her live if she gives up human blood. Just then the Volturi arrive. They’re led by Jane, a small vampire with little patience for this whole situation. The prisoner pleads for her life, but Jane basically says nope, I didn’t fly out from Italy just to play vampire baseball. She has one of her followers kill the prisoner and then leaves, but not before telling Edward to get on with it and vampirize Bella or else.

Chapter 26. Ethics

In this series? Not likely.

The counter in Alice's bathroom was covered with a thousand different products,
all claiming to beautify a person's surface.

A person’s surface? As in skin? Let’s not jump to conclusions.

Some unimportant conversations happen, and we learn Jacob is on the mend. Bella goes to visit him, he tries to win her heart yet again, etc., etc. It doesn’t work, naturally, but there is an interesting bit where Jacob reflects that he and Bella would have a pretty good relationship if they didn’t live in a world of inconvenient supernatural rubbish. Yeah, and we might have a decent book, too. I think that without the constant supernatural plot eruptions, we might have actually had a workable romance in this series.

Bella reflects on this and agrees, but she basically points out that they do live in world of stalker vampires and pedophillic werewolves, so she’s totally okay with marrying Edward. Well, not in so many words, but whatever. Jacob goes on to point out that Edward and Bella’s relationship is honestly kind of unhealthy, and, well, he’s right. Sadly, this isn’t followed up at all.

Time passes. More allegedly romantic conversations with Edward. Alice ditzes out planning Bella’s wedding. Bella resigns herself to being married.

Epilogue. Choice

This part is apparently written from Jacob’s perspective, a first for the series. It’s not exactly a radical change, for Jacob’s internal monologue sounds just like Bella’s, which sounds just like Edward’s. (Based on three chapters of Midnight Sun, anyway.) Stephenie Meyer doesn’t seem up to the task of writing more than one character’s perspective, and atttempting to do so in a single book doesn’t help.

We learn that tensions are running high in the pack because the introduction of a female werewolf has resulted in a bunch of homoerotic dreams caused by the telepathy they share. Seriously. I’m not making this up. Promise. Oh, and that’s the end of the book. Not making that up either.

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Final thoughts on Eclipse:

By any standards except those set by the previous book in the series, this novel is a failure. The unbelievable romance between Bella and Jacob that started in New Moon metastasized into the centerpiece of Eclipse. Bella’s relationship with the Cullens gets even more abusive, and Alice–previously the one semi-sensible Cullen–has been reduced to a flighty ditz. The werewolf subplot went completely snooker loopy. Each character tries to outdo the others in becoming the most unlikeable. If New Moon hadn’t set the bar so breathtakingly low, this would be merely a weak and baffling followup to Twilight. As it is, it’s still weak and baffling, but it’s a breath of fresh air compared to three hundred pages of Bella narrating her own codependence.

There is one way in which Eclipse is a success, and that’s horror. Not intentional horror, necessarily, but it counts. It counts because it seems to take place in an alien universe where adults see nothing wrong with claiming toddlers as lovers, where abusive and codependent relationships are idealized, and where consent is viewed as unnecessary at best, and counterproductive at worst, to falling in love. It’s also a world where time passes, but nobody changes: despite aging nearly three years since the start of Twilight, Bella is practically the same person she was as a seventeen-year-old. Edward apparently stopped maturing a century ago and resigned himself to a life of eternal teenagerdom. Truly a waste of immortality.

I may take a few weeks off before starting Breaking Dawn. It’s gotten harder and harder to find this series funny, and I’ve heard the last book is the worst of all. I confess that I found Eclipse hard to get through at times, but not for the reasons I thought I would. I started the series expecting weak writing to be my primary target, but the intellectual and moral implications turned out to be a much bigger problem. The series has, simply put, issues. Serious issues.