Twilight

When I started Twilight, I anticipated really disliking it. I had seen the movie, which had some nice cinematography but was rather dull, and had read other people's reviews of how terrible the writing in the original novel was but was still curious enough to give it a shot. Perhaps it was just low expectations, but I ended up enjoying it more than I expected.

If you've been paying attention to popular culture for any length of time, you're already familiar with the premise, plot, character, etc. so I'm going to skip directly into commenting on the story.

To start, the writing isn't that bad. I won't claim that Meyer is a great author or that it isn't a bit clunky at times, but it's worth keeping in mind that it's being told from the point of view of a seventeen-year-old girl with a fondness for early Gothic and romantic literature. I thought the writing fit the strange mix of banal, awkward and overheated that you'd expect from a girl like Bella. It could be argued that those elements above represent not Bella's limitations but Meyer's, but I can't see why not to give the author the benefit of the doubt.

I think the interesting mix of Gothic and realistic elements actually works pretty well a good deal of the time. It seems perhaps a rather simple formula, filtering overheated teenage emotions through the overheated emotions of the Gothic tale, which helps highlight how bewildering and overpowering emotions can be, especially for adolescents. It is possible that Meyer stumbled into some of these elements. Perhaps the idea of the story starting off when the virginal heroine moves from her sunlit world into a gloomy place connected with her own past wasn't intentionally borrowing from older Gothic tales, but again I feel the author deserves the benefit of the doubt.

Additionally, this makes what might be interpreted as absurd elements a little more understandable. The interest that every boy in Forks shows towards Bella isn't just a Mary-Sueism, it's the fact that only in this gloomy world is she capable of becoming an adult. Her clumsiness, so over the top as to be absurd, suggests the struggle to come to terms with her own adult self, both physically and emotionally.

The novel is not without it's flaws, though I think some of these are pretty typical of the paranormal romance genre. The book seems to fall most flat when it tries to go dark. As a threat, James seemed almost laughably bland, and Edward's tale of his brief time hunting humans leaves so little impression that it's no surpirse it was cut from the movie. The book is particularly unconvincing when trying to suggest the threatening aspect of vampirism. Vampirism comes off as pretty awesome, so that when by the end Bella is being asked to be turned into a vampire, it's difficult to understand Edward's resistance.

This is especially odd since Edward generally seems to come off as incredibly smug about how awesome he is. And while it's understandable that someone over a hundred years old and possessed of tremendous abilities would come to feel pretty superior, it seemed to me that all those years didn't seem to have taught Edward much in the way of maturity, so he ends up coming off as an entitled, self-satisfied jerk quite a bit. (A bit of an esoteric note here, but I wondered if it was a coincidence that Isabella, Bella's full name, is the name of the young sister in Wuthering Heights who, much to her own tragedy, falls in love with bad boy Heathcliff.)

So, while not great literature, I'd say Meyer is a worthy successor to Ann Radcliffe.