Rabbit Hole

Wow, May was a very light posting month.  I fell into a rabbit hole otherwise known as "The Twilight Saga."  For all kinds of reasons, not only simple pop cultural curiosity, the boyfriend and I watched "Twilight" on his laptop one evening.  After dinner, we cleared the plates and sat side by side at the little dining table and watched this rain-drenched, high school romance - it was kind of appropriate since it was sort of homework.  I fell under the "Twilight" spell.

Normally, I would just wait to watch the sequels, but I dove headlong into the series after reading Caitlin Flanagan's review in The Atlantic online.  I devoured the books one after another, just as the nice saleswoman at Barnes and Noble said I would.  I made my way through 2560 pages, plus the 200-odd pages of the "Midnight Sun" draft that can be found on Stephanie Meyer's website.  Much of the experience was like reliving the giddy parts of being 14 years old again.  "Twilight" is like swooning over your high school crush, looking at the cute boy across the school cafeteria - in my case, the school fountain - and hoping that he will look back and feel the same way.  "New Moon" is mostly a break-up/depression novel with a very nice dose of recklessness and best-friend-who-likes-you thrown in.  "Eclipse" is a tug-of-war/love triangle story, influenced by "Wuthering Heights."  And "Breaking Dawn" is something completely, completely different altogether.  Its siege story echoes and builds on that played out at the end of "Eclipse," but coupled with something else entirely.  I have to say that once the tension of forbidden, dangerous, erotic love has been resolved, there is not much else to keep me interested other than being a completist.  Wanting to find out what happens was nice, but it was a little cringe-inducing rather than satisfying.

Still all that life and death drama did remind of what it was like to be a teenager when everything felt so intense.  I was completely taken with the tension of having to restrain the savage, erotic bloodlust of the vampire to protect the pure and innocent heroine, who is quite happy to be corrupted by said bloodlust.  Some of the dark, lurid emotional tone of the movie and the books also reminded me of what I so love about the Gainsborough romances of the 1940s - I could being projecting rather a lot into it all here.

I staggered out the other end of the rabbit hole, blinking, realising that time had passed and I had inhabited a parallel universe.

The Twilight Saga

by Stephanie Meyer

2560 pages.

Little, Brown Young Readers