In a desperate bid to attract a new and spend-thrifty readership to Bewildered Heart this is the obligatory Twilight essay. In a self-destructive move to alienate this new-found readership, allow your new bookmarked blog to write the following. Stephenie Meyer is an appalling writer, Twilight is a hateful novel and pale, socially-awkward teenagers don't attract women. Meyer's prose is inept, pedantic and largely redundant. Her characters are insipid nobodies and three or four of them should have been merged into one. Her narrative arcs are dull, bloated and predictable. The relationships portrayed in her novels are lifeless and unrealistic. Some of her descriptions of locations are evocative, though there are no links to prove it.
Despite this, although surely because of this, the four episodes of her Twilight saga are among the most successful books of all time and the film franchise based upon these books has earned more money than it is politely acceptable to share socially. If this isn't a compelling reason for everyone to write their own bog-standard, trashy romance novel, what is? What's stopping you? Dignity?
The Twilight Saga Episode 1: Twilight weighs in at a hefty four-hundred and fifty pages. It's a tome. The story doesn't kick in until page three hundred, after a pointless and infuriating baseball game, and the half-hearted injection of antagonism is tacked on and quickly wasted. The bulk of the book is spent dealing with a potentially curious story involving a teenage girl, Bella, who falls in love with a vampire, Edward, and must deal with the dangers of vampirism, heightened by the melodrama of teenage first love, with the usual issues of disapproving, protective parents and a disapproving, spiteful student body.
Thankfully the vampire doesn't feast on human blood, the girl's father is largely absent and indifferent to her actions and everyone at school is super-nice. Any potential has gone. Phew! That was close. Something dramatic almost happened. The striking problem for the vampires of Twilight is how unlike conventional vampires they are. So unlike them, in fact, Meyer shouldn't have bothered. True Blood, Moonlight and Buffy the Vampire Slayer have already covered this ground, and on the medium of television, where everything makes more sense.
There are supernatural romances published every week that wallow in this tripe, and yet the massive appeal of Twilight over all the others like it remains baffling. What went right? Thank goodness Bewildered Heart has merely tasked itself with discovering what goes wrong with Harlequin novels, otherwise the question currently dogging literary agents would also be dogging us, and Blogspot just could not survive that volume of traffic.
Twilight is over twice the length of a standard Mills & Boon. However, any editor worth their salt would have been able to cut two hundred pages without harming what little plot there is. In that case, what stops Twilight from being prime Harlequin fodder? After all, the publishers have introduced a new sub-genre to cater for this claptrap, where werewolves, demons and vampires are de-clawed, unhorned, de-fanged and introduced to a nice urban lady with emotional problems and curly hair. Alternatively, lady-vampires (fempires?) and witches meet dark and sexy men who arouse in them more than just murder! Yikes. New titles include Wild Wolf (Wilf?), Demon's Seduction and Shadow of a Vampire. Get them while they're hot. Although please be advised that by hot we are not referring to the temperature of the books, we are using hot in the way kids do, to mean attractive and sexy. You will not be burned. Available in Adobe Reader!
As for resolution and conflict, besides the obvious, there's the immediate problem of vampires, werewolves and witches being lousy at domestic chores. A quick roll in the hay (or whatever it is vampires roll in) is not enough for Mills & Boon lovers. Sure, eternal love is possible for these characters, but everyone knows every marriage ends in divorce, except for those that death interrupts the inevitable breakdown of. Therefore eternal love is impossible. That's scientific fact.
Now, while Mills & Boon have a colourful history of inexplicable sexism, great efforts have been made over the decades to healthily respect the kind of foolish characters who have to exist for romance literature to work, and so recently most of the misogyny has become unintentional and largely consequential of the narrative structure. However, in Twilight the misogyny swaggers back onto centre-stage and tells the little woman to obey. Bella faints when Edward kisses her, the perfection of his perfect perfectness too much for her to handle. Bella really is a limp insult to girls everywhere, until you realise that teenage girls actually do faint once placed inside a room with the actor who plays Edward Cullen, thus proving the point of Meyer's books that all women are pathetic.
When Twilight finally ends the reader is left facing the unappetizing prospect of a further three books, each as door-stoppery as the previous. By the time the whole sordid affair is over our anaemic lovers have settled down to an eternity of wedded bliss. The fourth entry, Breaking Dawn, ends appropriately with Bella washing up while Edward dries and they have a cute conversation about the weather forecast and how if it is overcast they could drive to a coast and have lunch. Please note that this probably isn't how the book ends.
If Mills & Boon have guidelines, which they do, for a standard novel then they are traditional of the entire romance genre. Despite the ever-increasing gamut of sub-genres it remains difficult to find two books which differ in anything other than surface details. Stephenie Meyer's Twilight would never have been accepted by Mills & Boon because Mills & Boon have standards. Until the mighty and wise publishing house introduce a Teen section then our idiotic reading choices and teenagers' idiotic reading choices will have to remain on separate shelves.
