Twilight reviewed

Don't worry, I'm okay.

Recently I've been reading Twilight by Stephenie Meyer.

I haven't finished it yet. I've been meaning to write a review, and I suppose I should actually get to the end of the book first, but having got to about page 250, I'm not sure how much longer I can go on.

I wanted to like Twilight. I thought, I'll do something different (or the same) and read a best-selling book, and enjoy it, and find it to be strangely avant-garde and so on. I don't hate Twilight, actually, but it has come of something of a revelation to me, in a very depressing way, of where the pulse of the reading public is. Well, I suppose, in a lowest common denominator sense. Plenty of people will read Twilight and also read, say, J-K Huysmans, or Ihara Saikaku. I say plenty, but you have to take into consideration that there are not plenty of people who read Huysmans or Saikaku. Taken individually – readers of Huysmans as a single category, say – such readers can only be few, unless compared with the population of fluent native Welsh speakers. And even then, I dare say… So, I mean to add up all the readers who read Huysmans OR Saikaku OR Mark Samuels, etc., and ALSO read Twilight.

However, Twilight, even if one takes into account the lowest-common-denominator effect, is one of the biggest selling books on the entire planet at the moment, and that has to be representative of something – something that I find depressing, as noted.

Let's start with prose style. I had problems with this from the very beginning. (I wrote to a friend to say that the book was very badly written, and he wrote back to say bad writing has always sold, inviting me to take Agatha Christie as a case in point.)

The opening sentence:

I'd never given much thought to how I would die – though I'd had reason enough in the last few months – but even if I had, I would not have imagined it like this.

With all those 'had's, not to mention the inserted clause, the sentence resembles a grammatical tongue twister. It reminds me of the kind of sentence that Stephen Fry might toss off to show how ridiculous the English language is, and, specifically, the ways it is misused. I think it's the third (I mean, fourth) 'had' ("but even if I had") that is the problem. Of course, it refers to 'never given it much thought', but there a ghost in the construction of this sentence that makes it sound like it could also refer to 'had reason enough'. This might sound like nit-picking, but to write lucid prose, one must be aware of how prose works, or the images conjured become vague and tangled. The Preface, of which this sentence was a part, I had to read a number of times, just to try and reprocess the information in my head and make a coherent image of it. Ambiguity about subject-verb relations, tautology, and all manner of other stylistic fumblings of this kind are evident on almost every page of the novel.

But it's not just a matter of technical considerations, it's a matter of feeling (and I'm not sure we can divorce the two things. The Preface ends:

The hunter smiled in a friendly way as he sauntered forward to kill me.

Tum-te-tum-te-tum, and had a cup of tea. The very rhythm and diction are banal.

The writing is, indeed, incredibly bland. On the back of my copy is a quote from The Times. Whatever journalist wrote it should be ashamed:

Her story, recounted in hypnotic, dreamy prose, encapsulates perfectly the teenage feeling of sexual tension and alienation.

I have the feeing that the writer was primed to give a favourable review by the editor, did some Internet research, and didn't bother the read the actual book. If this is hypnotic, dreamy prose, then how the hell would you describe, for instance, Poe? Hypnotic and dreamy, too? Clearly, the only things Poe's work has in common with this book, however, is that it was written in the English language and dealt with supernatural themes.

But perhaps the nuance of 'dreamy' in the above quote is different. Perhaps it means dreamy the way that teenage girls refer to the hunks that the want to ask to the prom. He's dreamy, perfect, gorgeous, etc.

The story deals with a schoolgirl (17 years old, I believe) who falls in love with a vampire at the same school, by the name of Edward Cullen. I'm not going to recount the entire plot. Or, well, maybe I can: Bella sits next to Edward in class, he recoils from her, and disappears. She fancies him, and is hurt. Slowly she realises he's a vampire, and that he recoiled because he was afraid he'd drink her blood, because she's so gorgeous. However, he really loves her, and she loves him. I think some complications are approaching after page 250, but I haven't got to them yet. Anyway, how is Edward Cullen described? Well, he's hardly really described at all, except with non-descriptive words like 'gorgeous', 'perfect' and so on, over and over again. At one point, when she's being particularly descriptive, Meyer describes Cullen as like someone who has just stepped out of a hair-gel commercial. Yeah, that's some freaky, far-out fantasy! Let your imagination run wild! It's peculiar that the aesthetic of this vampire romance is so informed by hair-gels adverts and designer clothes, but such is the case. What kind of non-conformity is this? It really is quite fascinating.

So, anyway, we know why Bella likes Edward (more or less) – because he's dreamy, a real hair-gel dream such as a girl dares dream only once in a lifetime, if ever – but why does he like her? So far, not a clue. Why would anyone like such a dull, petty, whining teenager? Apparently she's different to other girls, but it's hard to see exactly how, unless it's the simple fact that she's uncoordinated and accident prone. Otherwise, she seems not to have any thought in her head except how dreamy Edward is, and how depressing the rainy weather is in the small town of Forks (a stroke of atmospheric genius to set the novel in a town perptually raining and overcast!), and how she's glad that her dad doesn't interfere with her very important life and just stays out of the way. Apparently such thoughts are too complex for the otherwise expert mind-reader, Edward Cullen, to be able to follow them in Bella's head. She is the only human whose mind he is unable to read. But then again, perhaps that's because it's very hard to read cotton wool.

I think I'll wind this review up for now, and maybe write more later (when I've finished the novel, if I ever do).

So far, I am at a loss as to explain the popularity of this book. I do think that Meyer has some residual talent as a story-teller, but not that much. She reminds me, in a way, of Ann Radcliffe, except that Radcliffe was a far superior writer, and wrote for a much different audience. I never finished The Mysteries of Udolpho, either. I was fond enough of her work to finally finish The Romance of the Forest, but… Radcliffe's work, like Meyer's in Twilight seems to be nothing else but emotional, heart-throbbing suspense – suspense, with nothing to suspend that suspense on. Just suspense. In an earlier age, Bella would have worn a bodice, and her heart would have fluttered deliriously against it pumping her anaemic blood into her squashed bosoms. Today, jeans and a sweater will do most of the time. I've heard of bodice-rippers, but could there be a sweater-ripper? If there were, I suppose it would be as dull as this book.