Twilight

Last weekend I spent some sick time reading Twilight and New Moon. A parent from Libby's class gave them to her, and we only have those two. Anyway, the point is that I read them and now I intend to say something about them.

Both books are entertaining. They're fun to read, have interesting stories to tell, and paint a believable world in which unusual creatures live. It's a well-spun fantasy romance set in modern time, and I was really able to buy into it.

I think Twilight was the better novel of the two. It's the purer romance - overcoming obstacles to achieve some kind of relationship is the very essence of any English language romance since Shakespeare, and best typified by Austen. What really makes this one different, though, is that it's a relationship between a self-conscious teenage girl and a god. Add vampires battling it out over the life of this girl, and you have a book well calculated to be awsome; all you need is werewolves! Wait! Sequel! Yes!

In Twilight, the vampires are not sub-humans, as they normally are (and should be) in myths, but beyond human. They have flaws and foibles, so they're nothing like God, but they're very much like something from the Olympian pantheon, and I think Edward and Bella's relationship is something like a Mormon retelling of a story from Ovid. (Isn't that the Mormon take on Mary, anyway?) The woman really is as unworthy of him as she senses herself to be, but in a post-Incarnational twist, he loves - not just lusts after her like the Romans or Greeks who have had him do - her anyway. In a demented way, though, this love is tied to her culinary attractiveness to him.

Actually, it's not just demented. It's very much part of the book's mythos. In New Moon, we learn that the connection forged between Edward and Bella is overpoweringly unbreakable. Like Romeo and Juliet (not paradigmatic human beings, themselves) or Catherine and Heathcliff, they're soul-mates. This has a physical element - Bella's tasty smell is uniquely consuming to Edward - but it also has a spiritual element exhibited via the psychic torment caused them by separation.

The idea of soul mates is a dangerous one. Plato introduced the idea in a fairly humorous way as part of Symposium (roly-poly humans separated by the gods - not an idea he bought into), but the idea can be used to justify many kinds of wicked acts, and I found myself shying away from the main conflict in the second novel because of my revulsion for it. Bella's inability to get over Edward is therefore a metaphysical fact, and not a failing on her part. This makes her a lot more sympathetic since it excuses her insanity, but since that's not actually the way the world works I wouldn't let my pre-teen daughter read this book for anything!

Further reading on the Twilight series on the internet:

John Granger of Harry Potter interpretation fame is blogging about it at Forks High School Professor. He thinks it's sorely under appreciated by academia. I don't buy that, the prose is just too poor for it to be taken seriously, but he has a lot of interesting thoughts on its themes. I found the Mormon connections he makes especially enlightening - Meyers is a committed member of the LDS church, and born and raised in that culture. This post on his Harry Potter blog is fascinating: http://www.hogwartsprofessor.com/the-harry-potter-twilight-connection/.

Dr. Reynolds has a review of it on his Middlebrow blog which also has good thoughts. He has a lower opinion of the series than John Granger: Twilight's Flawed Faith.

Finally, this movie review of New Moon from Christianity Today made me chuckle. I haven't seen the movie, so I can't endorse it (some reviews I've read prefer the movies to the books): http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/movies/reviews/2009/newmoon.html