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Twilight word vomit: New Moon

Monday, 13 April, 2009

New Moon opens with Bella and Edward as an established couple in the school. (Oh, actually, the book starts with a very Buffy-like dream where Bella sees herself as a grandmother with Edward eternally young, and the dream horrifies her.) In addition, Bella and Edward's “sister” Alice are pretty good friends. (Whereas Edward can read minds, Alice has some precognitive ability, and she has seen that one day Bella will be a vampire, so Bella is confident that one day it will happen, even if Alice is less sure about her abilities.)

It's Bella's birthday, and after a bit of a non-event at celebrations at her father's (he really isn't a very good father), she goes over to the Cullens who are big on celebrations, making her feel special and buying her expensive presents like plane tickets to Florida so she can spend some time with her mother. Then an accidental papercut causes Bella to have a bit of an accident as Jasper, the Cullen who has the most trouble curbing his appetite because he hasn't been “vegetarian” for very long, launches himself at her and Edward steps in to defend her. Bella goes flying into a glass table, cutting her arms pretty badly. She has to be stitched up by Carlisle (the father).

The whole incident causes Edward to think that it's no good for Bella to be around him, so he decides to break it off with her for her sake. She suspects something is happening because his behaviour towards her is different (they're still spending oodles of time together, and he sneaks into her bedroom at night; having the ability to read minds as well as superb physical reflexes means he knows when Charlie is approaching, so they never get caught ... you don't have to be a prude to see that this is a tremendously bad example for teen girls, even if they are chaste; their interactions are still highly erotic and their physical relationship is still improper outside of marriage). But it's still a shock when he actually breaks up with her—tells her he does not want her anymore and that his family are moving away. He promises her that it will be as if he never existed. In turn, he makes her promise to take care of herself and not do anything stupid.

How does Bella react? Her obsessiveness gives way to complete and total despair. Straight after he tells her the news, even though he puts her on the path towards home, she pursues him in the woods, gets lost and then spends the next couple of hours curled up in a ball on the forest floor, mumbling mindlessly to herself. They have to send out a search party to find her. And then, for the next four months, she pretty much succumbs to a depressive stupor. I joked on Twitter that “Karen has finished reading New Moon & thinks she finally gets teen romance horror: Edward = vampire, Jacob = werewolf & Bella = zombie” because that's what Bella pretty much becomes in Edward's absence: a zombie. She eats, she sleeps, she does her homework, she goes through the motions, but the lights are on and nobody's home. (To Meyer's credit, she really does capture what it feels like after a bad break-up; it's just that, as usual, Bella takes it too far. C'mon, girl, it's not the end of the world if some guy leaves you, no matter how much you love him!)

It gets to the point where her father has to intervene, and to get him off her back, she uses Jessica (and appallingly so) to pretend she's actually reconnecting with her friends, and then she reconnects with Jacob Black.

Jacob first appeared in Twilight. He's the son of Billy Black, an old friend of Bella's father, and they are North American Indians from the Quileute tribe who live on the reservation out at La Push. Her truck used to belong to him. He's slightly younger than Bella, but clearly impressed by her and her inept attempts at flirtation. He's the one who inadvertently reveals to Bella what Edward and the Cullens are.

Bella goes to see Jacob because she remembers he's good at fixing all manner of mechanical things. During her outing with Jessica at Port Angeles, she realises (after almost putting herself into a situation similar to the one that Edward rescues her out of in Twilight—the Port Angeles group of guys who are keen on gang raping her) that when she puts herself in danger, she can hear Edward's voice in her head, clear as a bell. So (and this really reveals Bella's stupidity) she decides to put herself into further danger so she can go on hearing Edward's voice in her head (going back on her promise; what a faithless girl!). And the best way to do that is to learn how to ride a motorcycle—something that is categorically against Charlie's wishes. She finds two motorcycles that a guy at school is throwing away, and takes them Jacob, and asks him to fix them and give her riding lessons. And he, being so enamored of her, complies.

Bella and Jacob have quite a nice friendship, but once again, she is using him: to her, he is her “sun”, and his presence dispels some of the pain she feels at Edward's absence. She doesn't seem to care about the effect she's having on Jacob—how she's leading him on, even though he knows that she doesn't care about him in that way. It isn't long before the When Harry Met Sally principle kicks in (“Men and women can never be friends because the sex part always gets in the way”). But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Bella tries to get a group of friends to go see a movie together (a horror movie because she can't stand watching romance movies; they remind her too much of Edward and she gets depressed watching them). Through circumstance, it works out that only Mike Newton and Jacob can make it. (Mike is a guy at her school who has liked Bella from the beginning.) She uses Mike a bit in this scene; it's here where her affection for Jacob starts developing a bit more, so poor Mike starts to feel like he's become a third wheel. Mike is sick on this particular occasion (oh yes, that's right; that's why no-one else could make it—they were all sick!), and Bella catches what he has. Jacob is similarly indisposed, but for him, it's not a stomach bug; it's werewolf-ism (or whatever the relevant noun is).

Now, I found the werewolves pretty interesting. Dramatically, it's quite interesting that the pack has a common mind—that they can talk to each other telepathically when they're in wolf form—that they don't age—that they have this lovely camaraderie (not unlike the closeness that the Cullens have. This is something that Bella is attracted to; notice the contrast between her broken family situation and their tight-knit loving relationships. It's interesting that one Twilight fan produced a T-shirt that reads, “I never got my letter from Hogwarts ... So I am moving to Forks to live with the Cullens.” The Twilight books tap into that desire to belong; no wonder both the vampires and the werewolves are so attractive to readers!)

Indeed, out of all the characters, Jacob is the most well-rounded (especially compared to the perfect Edward and the unlikable Bella). He is warm, he has flaws, he is extremely human (despite his werewolf-ness). I can understand why you'd join the pro-Jacob party ... Nevertheless, Meyer doesn't really do much with the werewolf thing. It's not a metaphor for male adolescence (like in Buffy) or male aggression and power, though part of that is there; it simply is in the world of Forks.

Now, Jacob can't tell Bella what's going on with him, but somehow she works it out (after he sneaks into her bedroom to talk to her; what is all this sneaking into bedrooms?! I'm sure that's a PhD thesis in the making—something dangerous about having desirable males breaching the boundary of that sacred of all spaces—a teen girl's bedroom ...) She also suspects as much after she encounters the werewolves who come to her rescue after Laurent tries to eat her. (Laurent reveals an important plot cue: Victoria is after her in revenge for James getting killed in the first book.)

Okay, I'm getting bored with recounting the plot so let's speed it up:

• Bella and Jacob start becoming closer and closer, and you start thinking that she may give up on Edward at least, and change her affections. Jacob steps into Edward's protective role because, as usual, Bella is in danger: Victoria is after her.
• Then Bella does something really stupid: she jumps off a cliff. She does it because Jacob promised to take her cliff-diving one day, but she was bored and he wasn't around. So she just did it by herself, not thinking about the consequences. She hits the icy water and realises that she can't fight the current. Nor does she want to. So she surrenders herself to death, seeing Edward's stricken face in her mind.
• Jacob saves her. (Bella needs perpetual saving in these books ... *sigh*. Meyer is seriously trading on the knight-in-shining-armour trope.)
• Alice (who, you remember, has precognitive abilities), saw her fall, but werewolves, for some reason, don't show up in her visions, so she didn't see Bella being rescued. She jumped on the first plane to Forks to verify events for herself. But the damage is already done: Rosalie tells Edward that Bella is dead, and in his grief, he decides to go to Italy to get himself killed by the Volturi, the royal family of the vampire world.
• Thus the last quarter of the book is another chase sequence, with Bella and Alice rushing to Italy (not involve Charlie in the decision) to stop Edward from doing something extremely stupid.
• They are in time, but now they are in trouble with the Volturi, who insist that, because Bella knows too much about their world, she must either become a vampire or die. They promise the Volturi that Bella will become a vampire one day, and manage to escape from there.
• Edward doesn't want to change Bella, and he reckons that because some of the things that other vampires can do (e.g. shocking them with extreme pain) don't affect Bella, he doesn't think they'll be able to find her. But Bella is more concerned about the Volturi coming after them, so puts it to a vote to the Cullens. Then she strikes a deal with Carlisle—that he will do the deed for her after graduation. Edward, playing his bargaining chip, strikes another deal with her: in exchange for him doing the deed and not Carlisle, he wants her to marry him. Like I said before, she's not too keen on the idea.
• Bella is back with Edward, but her friendship with Jacob is seriously affected. In addition, the vampire treaty with the werewolves is in jeopardy because the treaty specifies that the vampires are never to bite a human being, not kill.

Love, true love ...

Phew, thank goodness we got that out of the way! Now, New Moon is loosely based on Romeo and Juliet, but, again, the resemblance is only superficial. (I read somewhere that Meyer did English lit at Uni; it makes me wonder what sort of education she received.) Romeo is obviously Edward, Bella is obviously Juliet, and Jacob is (not so obviously) Paris. Juliet rushes in to save Romeo at the last minute (hence New Moon is so obviously not Romeo and Juliet because Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy!) There are two factions—the vampires and the werewolves. Really, there's no point in drawing any more links; Meyer has just confused everything so parallels are not possible.

But I think what she is driving at is the strength of Romeo and Juliet's love. Edward and Bella's love is so strong, it transcends everything. Or so we are meant to believe. Bella hearing Edward in her head because of stupid things is explained away not by some kind of supernatural plot device (Edward can't read Bella's mind anyway; for some reason, she's the only one immune to his telepathic powers); the reason is because, deep down, she's always known that he loves her (duh):

“See, I found out that ... when I was doing something dangerous or stupid ... I could remember you more clearly ... I could remember how your voice sounded when you were angry. I could hear it, like you were standing right there next to me. Mostly I tried not to think about you, but this didn't hurt so much—it was like you were protecting me again. Like you didn't want me to be hurt.

“And, well, I wonder if the reason I could hear you so clearly was because, underneath it all, I always knew that you hadn't stopped loving me.”

Again, as I spoke, the words brought with them a sense of conviction. Of rightness. Some deep place inside me recognized truth.

His words came out half-strangled. “You ... were... risking your life ... to hear—”

“Shh,” I interrupted him. “Hold on a second. I think I'm having an epiphany here.”

I thought of that night in Port Angeles when I'd had my first delusion. I'd come up with two options. Insanity or wish fulfilment. I'd seen no third option.

But what if ...

What if you sincerely believed something was true, but you were dead wrong? What if you were so stubbornly sure that you were right, that wouldn't even consider the truth? Would the truth be silenced, or would it try to break through?

Option three: Edward loved me. The bond forged between us was not one that could be broken by absence, distance or time. And no matter how much more special or beautiful or brilliant or perfect than me he might be, he was as irreversibly altered as I was. As I would always belong to him, so would he always be mine. (pp. 526-27)

I said before that Edward and Bell fall into Wallerstein's “romantic” category of relationships. I think this is another reason why the books are so attractive: that's what women want—to be immersed, obsessed and devoured by so perfect a love—so strong a love—a love that transcends time and space. (Edward says, “Isn't it supposed to be like this? ... The glory of first love, and all that.”—Twilight, p. 302.) The problem is, their love is an inwardly focused sort of love—a self-centred sort of love—in short, a love that does not accurately mirror the love of God. There are aspects of it that seem right—for example, their unashamed desire for one another, their joy in the physical aspects of love, the way they put each other's needs before their own (well, Edward does that a bit more than Bella)—but it's an exclusive love. It shuts out the rest of the world. It has no time for anyone else. If you were single, you could not hang around with Bella and Edward because there simply wouldn't be any room.

(Okay, die-hard fans are now saying, “What about Jacob?” I'm getting there ...)

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