Despite the nearly two decades (wow I feel old) of people making fun of Twilight, I decided to read it and do my very best to be completely fair. And I’m afraid that my fair assessment is that this is not good.
To start with the good: I give Meyer full credit for an interesting spin on vampire mythology. I really like this idea of a coven of vampires living as “vegetarians” and getting their sustenance from animals exclusively, despite humans being very much their biologically preferred prey. (Sir Terry’s Black Ribboners are a similar spin on this. It’s remarked at one point that many of them get jobs in slaughterhouses.)
I also get the appeal of this book to readers, particularly younger readers, as an escapist fantasy. It’s easy to see how a reader - particularly an adolescent girl feeling all the awkwardness that comes with being a teenager - could project herself into Bella. She’s kind of a blank slate.
Which leads to the single biggest problem here. There’s a concept called the “Sexy Lamp Test,” a cousin to the better known Bechdel Test. The idea here is to ask: “Could a female character be replaced with the leg lamp from A Christmas Story without significantly altering the story?” In other words, does the character in question have any important traits besides being desirable? Is she anything but an object of lust?
The single biggest problem with Twilight isn’t that it fails the Sexy Lamp Test (though it does). Twilight manages to fail it twice. Bella and Edward both could be replaced with the sexy leg lamp, and the story wouldn’t really have to change all that much. The James Bond franchise has shown often enough that you can spectacularly fail the Sexy Lamp Test and still tell an entertaining story. But when both your leads can be replaced with inanimate objects, you don’t have a fun story. You have a still-life.
It’s a failure of “show, don’t tell.” Meyer doesn’t show us that Bella is desirable, or that Edward is; she just tells us, and it means the entire book doesn’t really have a foundation to stand on.
This isn’t the only problem with Twilight. Let’s talk about that age gap. Speaking as a nearly 40 year old, Edward being 100+ years old and Bella being 17 is downright creepy. Maybe I would have felt differently if I’d read this as a teenager, but it was borderline repulsive to read. And why on God’s green earth would an immortal vampire, over a century old, choose to go to high school?
I also want to address the big failure of the last quarter or so of the book. A book should have conflict of some sort, and a book centered on the relationship between a human and a vampire should have some degree of physical danger. Edward tells Bella, ad nauseam, that he is dangerous to her. So why did Meyer not do what she was foreshadowing the entire book, and have Edward actually become a danger to Bella? Why did she have to bring in another vampire, with no build up, and have him be the threat? It was functionally equivalent to the danger to Bella coming from, say, an earthquake. Sure, it’s an actual danger, but it’s not something that grew out of the story being told. Just random.
Last point I want to address is the writing. It was … OK. Not great, but mostly didn’t get in the way. With one important exception: the dialogue. Any conversation between Edward and Bella was just awful. So stilted, so unnatural.
I’m being pressured to read the rest of the series, and I may well choose to. But for now I need a break.
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