I thought it would be amusing to begin my final recap post with a Shakespeare quote, just like the Twilight books. My selection, though, is a bit more mordant:
“But this rough magic
I here abjure, and, when I have required
Some heavenly music, which even now I do,
To work mine end upon their senses that
This airy charm is for, I’ll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I’ll drown my book.”
The Tempest, Act V, Scene i
For all their ease, I almost regret reading the series as e-books. I wouldn’t mind burying them full five fathoms deep.
When I started recapping Twilight six months ago, I did it because it was both popular and because it’s something I would never read under normal circumstances. A vampire romance novel? I spent my brief career in a bookstore laughing with my coworkers at the trash bags full of thin paperbacks with pale, brooding, toothy, and shirtless men on the covers. I regard ordinary, plain vanilla romances with mild bemusement, and when I think of the more exotic variants at all, I feel hardly anything besides derision. When I started Twilight, I thought my read-through would make a good spectacle because of this; I did it, as they say nowadays, for the lulz.
As I look back on the books, I realize I came to the series with the unconscious expectation that I would dislike the books because of who I am, not because of what they were. To my surprise and dismay, Twilight gave me plenty of legitimate reasons to dislike it. The writing is amateurish, and Stephenie Meyer makes just about every mistake a new writer can make. I wouldn’t complain if this were a new author’s first draft, not least because it would be hypocritical to do so; when I wrote fiction, my first drafts looked just as bad. But it’s impossible to write well without hard work, and a lot of the hardest work happens in revision. Revision might have trimmed the cliches, fleshed out the characters with interests and believable motivations, added a real plot. We can dream.
To my mind, though, the series’ biggest failure is that it doesn’t even work as a romance. Nowhere in these pages can anything resembling realistic affection be found; the closest thing is a sort of perpetual burning–a view of romance better suited to middle school than rational adults. There is nothing unique to the love between Bella and Edward, no affinity of interests or affections that brings them together. It’s hard to imagine, for example, Bella looking back on a few decades of immortal life and saying, yes, the money and immortality was nice, but what really struck her about Edward was how nice he is, or the way he makes her laugh, or how he brought her out of herself and showed her that there was something nice about Forks after all. The same goes for Edward; for all the story gives us, he could just as well have fallen in love with the next girl with an appetizing smell and a mind that can’t be read. We’re told time and again that they are wise beyond their years and genuinely in love, not just infatuated, but the romance we actually see is more suited to middle school student’s fantasy of what grown-up love is like than the actual thing. Isn’t this strange? Granted, the idealization of romance is inherent to the romance genre, but who idealizes this kind of romance? This would be odd even if Edward weren’t a weird loser who stalks high school girls, but that’s just the icing on a very creepy cake.
Of course, this doesn’t even touch on the other baffling romantic element in the series. Do I even need to say it? Is there anyone who isn’t squicked out by imprinting? Is there an explanation for the series’ sunny indifference to the power disparity between child and adult that even remotely reflects well on Meyer? In the real world, this kind of behavior earns you a visit from the FBI party van and a very awkward visit to the neighbors, and Stephenie Meyer’s vague insistence otherwise only makes it harder to like her characters, not less. It made my dislike of the books easier, but not in any welcome way. I had expected to give a silly series a hard time, not experience genuine loathing for creepy books. It was the literary equivalent of biting into cotton candy only to find at the center a dead rat.
So the Twilight series is too long and too weird. That said, it’s hard to blame Meyer for stretching things out so much; if I were offered oodles of money and told that I could write whatever I wanted as long as I got more books out of it, I’m sure I’d find a way to justify doing the same thing. Writing is an awful lot like play, and it’s hard to turn down money for spending more time in a universe you lovingly created.
