(As Meyer pointed out in a recent interview: “Really the problem is that he’s murdered a ton of people.”)
Edward’s habit of breaking into Bella’s bedroom to watch her sleep, for example, was held up by some highly literal commentators as modelling unhealthy boundaries to impressionable young women, who were still learning how to navigate their own relationships with vampires. Midnight Sun could be read as Meyer’s attempt at a do-over, following criticism of Twilight for romanticising a coercive relationship. But taken together, the two narratives at least depict mutual attraction. It would be hard for any reader to find Bella as fascinating as Edward does, with her character, never very distinctive, now smothered by his adoring gaze (“the English language needed a word that meant something halfway between a goddess and a naiad”). The next 600 pages feel a bit like being sat uncomfortably close to a young couple who won’t stop kissing. Instead, by page 150 he is hopelessly in love with her, and the feeling is soon reciprocated. But Edward’s agonising over his urge to bite the new girl at school is supposed to lend the story a dark new twist. This, any Twihard already knows from Twilight.
His sister Alice sees visions of the future and both skills function quite prosaically as plot devices as Edward listens in on people thinking about Bella, or grills Alice about what is going to happen to her. The key difference between Twilight, narrated by Bella, and Midnight Sun, narrated by Edward, is the latter’s special vampire skill of hearing other people’s thoughts (though not Bella’s, contributing to her appeal). But 12 years later, the novel is out – and, at more than 750 pages, it is immediately clear why it took her so long. Early chapters of the book were leaked in 2008, prompting Meyer to put the project on hold. Neither apply to the experience of reading Midnight Sun, Meyer’s long-awaited project, which has been described as a “companion” novel to the first instalment, this time retold from Edward’s perspective rather than Bella’s.
Vampire and girl settle for some heavy necking – and some agonised yearning, which they seem to enjoy just as much.Īs was made explicit when the story was wrung dry of teen pheromones and repurposed as Fifty Shades of Grey, what fuelled the Twilight phenomenon 15 years ago was the ecstasy of delayed gratification, and the pleasure to be found in pain. Actually, that’s only the end of book one in Stephenie Meyer’s bestselling four-part series.
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