Twilight: Chapter One

So this is the beginning.  :)

Chapter one introduces us to Bella and Forks, and already I'm just a wee bit torn.  Bella is the heroine; the person we're supposed to root for and admire...but I just don't.  Only a few pages in she is revealed to be a snotty, ungrateful martyr.  She's disrespectful and rude too, what with calling her father Charlie in her head (but not to his face) and constantly putting down her mother as flighty, irresponsible, and needing a man to take care of her.  Charlie tells her that's he's bought her a truck as a homecoming present.  Now, a normal person would immediately say "thank you", at least if they'd been raised right.  But not Bella.  No, instead she interrogates him on the type of vehicle it is, how old it is, and complains that she won't be able to fix it if it breaks.  If my father had purchased me a car and I reacted like that, he'd have taken the car right back where he got it from and I'd have been SOL.

I can understand Bella having a strained relationship with her father; I've had one with my own.  Divorce has some nasty side effects.  But what bothers me most here is that Bella has deliberately chosen to go live with him, and he's clearly making an effort to make the transition as smooth as possible, and yet Bella insists on treating him badly.  We as readers still don't know what motivated this spontaneous move to Forks (we're several pages in although I'm reading a PDF copy so I don't have actual page numbers to reference) and that's kind of a sign of bad writing.  This blog isn't just to summarize the books as I read them (obviously that's a big part) but I also want to discuss the nature of the writing itself because in any book it's not just the content that matters but how it's presented.

Stephenie Meyer is clearly an amateur writer.  Her prose is simplistic and a bit mundane; chapter one walks us through Bella getting settled in Forks complete with sentences like, "When I finished putting my clothes in the old pine dresser, I took my bag of bathroom necessities and went to the communal bathroom to clean myself up after the day of travel."  As readers we don't need that kind of detail.  Especially because the details we DO need are inexplicably absent.  Most notably, despite her multitude of complaints against Forks and how much she hates it there we have zero idea why she willingly moved herself there.  All we know is that the move WAS willing, and so my sympathies for Bella are decidedly lessened.  She brought this on herself - complaining about it after the fact is not a trait to be admired.

However, once Bella enters the bathroom and looks at herself in the mirror we get a moment of introspection that is somewhat surprising.  Bella feels insecure and worries that she won't fit in.  This I can actually relate to.  I think most girls can.  Bella thinks, "Sometimes I wondered if I was seeing the same things through my eyes that the rest of the world was seeing through theirs. Maybe there was a glitch in my brain."  This is interesting to me.  This provides a tiny glimpse into the inner workings of Bella.  I want to know more about this.  Why does she feel this way? Has it always been so, or is this a recent development? How does she see the world?  Unfortunately I don't think Meyer ever goes down that road.

In a clumsy bit of foreshadowing, Bella says upon arriving at school, "I can do this, I lied to myself feebly. No one was going to bite me."  Indeed.  No one is going to bite you, thus setting up the next three books in this series.  :P

Bella's first class is English, and her assigned book list is...odd.  "it was fairly basic: Bronte, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Faulkner. I'd already read everything."  First, that's a weird collection of authors.  What kind of class is this?  The Brontes wrote in the 1800s (and which Bronte is being assigned anyway?), Shakespeare the 15 and 1600s, Chaucer the 1300s, and Faulkner the early 20th century.  Faulkner was American, the rest were British, and all four wrote wildly different genres.  All four are pretty difficult reads too, and I just don't buy a high school English teacher assigning these particular authors all in one little HIGH SCHOOL semester.  College, maybe.  But even then these authors wouldn't be paired together; that's just WEIRD.  Second, Bella flippantly states that she'd read them all and so the list was boring.  My opinion that's she a snotty little brat is being confirmed.  Any one of these authors can be read multiple times and you'll always find new things each time. That's what makes them brilliant. 

Bella is then rude and sarcastic to Eric when he tries to be helpful and friendly.  Earlier I felt a stab of sympathy for her because I could relate to her fear of not fitting in.  But if she's going to be rude and stand-offish to everyone who attempts to help her fit in then my sympathy is considerably lessened.

Next we (finally) have our first glimpse of the Cullens, in the lunch room, where they act extremely suspiciously.  Obviously I already know that they're vampires masquerading as high school students, but they're doing it wrong.  To sit at a table with food in front of them, not talking and not eating is a surefire way to call attention to themselves.  Especially if they're as beautiful as Meyer says they are.  But that's really just a minor quibble so I'll let it go.  Bella then goes off to Biology where she's paired up with Edward.  He is openly hostile in this first meeting; extremely tense, glaring at her with revulsion and anger.  THIS is her one true love? No. This is a scary creep.

"Edward Cullen's back stiffened, and he turned slowly to glare at me — his face was absurdly
handsome — with piercing, hate-filled eyes. For an instant, I felt a thrill of genuine fear, raising the hair on my arms."  Bella.  Honey.  LISTEN TO YOUR INSTINCTS.  If you have a fearful reaction that powerful just from looking at a person, you need to run away.  I do not understand how she can just ignore all this and pine after him the way she does.  I know what it's like to be afraid of a man.  I didn't stay with my abuser because I loved him and was happy.  I stayed because I was afraid he'd hurt me or kill my cat if I left.  That kind of fear is debilitating and neither healthy nor normal.  This may be my biggest problem with the Bella/Edward love story.  For Meyer to be pushing this kind of relationship as ideal and wonderful is sick and twisted.

Thus ends chapter one.  We still have no clue why Bella went to Forks; just that she's miserable. This is a plot failure.  The whole point of the intro chapter is to introduce the main players, set up the circumstances of the plot, and put the plot in motion towards its first turning point.  This chapter does none of those things.  It was incredibly long and yet it didn't actually convey any plot.  We barely know who the characters are (they have names and vague descriptions, but nothing else), we have no motivation for why the action is taking place in the detested Forks, we don't even know where the plot is trying to go.  All we have is an annoying main character meticulously recounting her day.  Bella so far has come across as alternately a whiny martyr and a rude bitch, and all we know of Edward is that he's the most beautiful thing she's ever seen and oh yeah, he's evil and hates her guts. 

Two stars.  There are nuggets here that could have been explored to greater effect in the hands of a better writer, but overall it was too long and didn't even use that length to convey useful or interesting information.