Posted By orchard on March 25, 2010
It’s virtually impossible to ignore Twilight. Especially if you are a married guy. Even more so if you are LDS.
Here’s the deal: The book came out in 2006. It’s 3 1/2 years old. Pretty much 60% of the women that I know about have read it. Move into the LDS population and that jumps to something like 90% of the women between about 18 and 40. I’ll be nice and say that the reaction is enthusiastic.
So here it is 2010, and my wife (see…) checks the book out of the library and says to me, “I’d like you to read this”. That’s fair–I hand her books and tell her that she would enjoy them quite often. Only when I really think she will, but since I read so much, it’s pretty often that I find one that I think she will like. So I had this book lurking on the bookshelf in our bedroom (that’s right), and I figure it won’t take me long to read it, so I might as well.
Now I’m going to quote this article by Orson Scott Card (also LDS, in case you didn’t know):
“For instance, I really hate vampire fiction. I don’t understand why anyone is attracted to it. So even though I know Stephenie Meyer to be a faithful Latter-day Saint and a lovely human being, I’m incapable of giving a fair reading to her vampire novels.
That doesn’t mean I have some kind of duty to “save” other people from reading her novels by getting them banned from bookstores.”
Now to be clear, I don’t hate vampire fiction–I quite enjoyed Angel, and I liked Sarah Ash’s “Tears of Artaman” series as it’s a refreshing look at the vampire and dragon mythologies. But it is hard for me to give Twilight a fair shake despite the fact that I’m positive Stephanie Meyer is a good person.
I’m not going to talk about the story itself much–although I seriously doubt that there are any real spoilers I could give at this point. Instead I want to focus on the storytelling, because really I think that’s the important part of a story. Plot is not unimportant, but to be honest, a simplistic or even revisited plot can be made to work if the story is well-written.
The plot of Twilight is (as far as I know) original enough, but it certainly plays on a lot of familiar themes. Girl meets boy, falls in love, there are obstacles to that love, they overcome obstacles, all is dandy.
Now the question is (in my mind): is it well told. The answer, predictably, is both yes and no. Despite myself, as I read the book, I did find her style engaging. That said there are two or three things that really bothered me. First is the occasional grammatical gaffe. I’m not talking about using who instead of whom, but tense matching (Bella says something about doing something ‘tomorrow’, when she in narrating the story in the past tense; this wouldn’t be a problem if she had been talking to someone other than the reader when that comes up) is important. If you write a book in the standard 3rd person omniscient past, then you need to stick with that. Even third person limited. First person perspectives need somewhat more careful attention, primarily because you know that the person telling the story is going to survive. In a romance novel, this is okay. In a vampire-novel, it *might* be okay, but it certainly takes out any sense of real danger. Nevertheless breaking with the chosen tense and character is jarring.
The other thing that really jarred me out of any immersion in the book was the vampire baseball. As a device to show how strong and physically impressive the vampires are, it worked. It also worked to set up with the ‘wild’ vampires. Except for one minor problem–it wasn’t necessary. Now I recognize that a lot of things happen in real life that aren’t ‘necessary’. I certainly didn’t need to eat that candy bar yesterday, but I did. But a novel is different–we expect as readers to be shown the things that are most relevant to the story itself. Some authors are very sparse in this regard, while others (I’m looking at you Mr. Jordan! Tad Williams, you are at LEAST as guilty!) are very verbose. Twilight reads like a book that’s reasonably terse. There’s little in the book that isn’t plot-driven. Meyer even makes sure to go back and explain why some thing are important. But the vampire baseball is redundant for showing the physical prowess of the vampires. At that point in the book if a reader hasn’t figured out that the vampires are insanely strong and fast, they haven’t been paying attention at all. Edward stops a car with his bare hands then picks up a van with one hand! This guy is strong. We get that.
So I found that jarring. Not that there is some objective standard that says it was a bad scene, I just found it jarring because of the redundancy.
Now to the real question: will I read the sequels? Yes. I likely will. Overall, for a book solidly aimed at a different demographic (not males 33 yrs old), it did a remarkably good job of getting and holding my attention. I don’t love it, and I’m not a fan. But I do recognize that they are engaging, but I thinks that is more of a function of the storytelling than the plot. Well done Ms. Meyers.
Note: I have the deepest respect for anyone that can actually finish a book and get it published. They’ve done more than I have. Maybe some day.
Category: book review |
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Tags: twilight, vampires