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“Clumsy teenage girl moves from big city to small town. Notices good looking, semi-hostile boy. Is mesmerised. Then he turns out to have superpowers, saves her life, and romance ensues. Oh, and he's a vampire.
Twilight is hardly an original novel. Admittedly, I can think of few other human-vampire love stories, but aside from the gimmick, the novel is painfully pedestrian. The writing is not particularly engrossing or delightful. While there is a sense of humour, it is a fairly repetitive, simple humour based on smirky taunts and glares. (Someone should do a word count on this novel. The word glare appears more often than any other....)
In many ways, this reads like wish fulfilment literature. Scenes play themselves out over and over and over again, with small variations. The mysterious, but stunningly beautiful boy keeps working hard on being mysterious and slightly threatening, but protective. There is constant emphasis on fast cars, fast driving and the physical strength of the boy, who knows just how much to overcome the girl without ever losing his "gentleman" appeal to her. Her heart keeps futtering, pounding and stopping like a rusty car engine with clogged exhaust pipes. I have never read any Mills & Boon, but this is roughly what I imagine it would be like, minus a bit of porn.
Which is not to say it is a complete disaster. Its commercial success eludes my comprehension, but it is an easy, quick, occasionally vaguely amusing read. The characters may be uninteresting, and the plot beyond predictable, and the back cover blurb gives away the first third of the book without batting an eyelid, but if you're in the mood for literary junk food, this is not the worst possible choice. After all the "romantic" stuff, there is a vaguely tense thrillery finale, because, let's face it, if our young couple had met one more time to talk about why this is oh-so-wrong but oh-so-right at the same time, they might have induced nausea in even the most romantically inclined of readers.
(There is a lot of talking in this novel. I would estimate it's about 1/3 dialogue, and it's more or less the same dialogue, over and over and over again).
Twilight is the literary equivalent of Galaxy chocolate. It's just about good enough if you don't know any better and it's all that is available conveniently. ”
Robert H wrote this review Monday, August 3 2009.
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