Upon Re-reading "Twilight"

Two years ago, I wrote this. If you don't want to follow the link, don't worry. I'll explain--no, wait, there's too much--I'll sum up. The link was to a previous post on this blog in which I expressed my thoughts on first reading Twilight, including a fun anecdote in which the moment I read the last word on the last page, I immediately sprang up, grabbed my car keys, and booked it to the nearest store to buy a copy of New Moon, the sequel to Twilight. In the post I also express a half-awareness of the book's "guilty pleasure" status, yet I remain shameless (mostly).

And now, two years later, I've had time to read the book a couple more times, to see the movie (could have been better, could have been worse), and to distance myself for awhile from the entire phenomenon (as long as I wasn't within 50 feet of a preteen girl, or the mother of a preteen girl). And I would have to say that my opinion of the novel has not altered fundamentally, though time has given it cultivation and nuance.

You know how there are some books that could be page-turners because they're such great stories, but you don't want to read them that fast? They're so good that you just want to take your time, to soak in the prose and study every detail of the characters. For me, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is such a novel (so far), but Twilight was not.

Stephenie Meyer has stated on several occasions something to the effect of, she does not consider herself a writer, but a storyteller. I wholeheartedly agree with her. Keeping in mind that Twilight was her first novel (and I would imagine speedily written, having rather famously appeared to her in a dream a la Mary Shelley's Frankenstein), her prose and her characterization do leave something to be desired. But where she is not lacking is in her ability to tell a compelling story--just try to not stay up far later than your intended bed time while reading this book--and to set a mood.

Twilight is probably one of the moodiest books I've ever read. I was entirely captivated by the setting, a gloomy, romantic, fairy-tale-enchanted-forest kind of setting. Every tree in the town of Forks is dripping with angst and mystery. (Forks is a real town, by the way, to which I've been, both before and after it became a mecca for Twilight fans--I live about four hours away by car. The real Forks isn't nearly as interesting as the fictional one.)

Meyer could not have picked a better location to set her tale, though. Forks is right in the middle of Washington state's Olympic National Forest, one of the only remaining old-growth forests in North America. It's the kind of forest where you would expect to find a cottage full of dwarves, or maybe a vampire.

There was an article in the March 2010 issue of Discover Magazine that was actually about Dutch scientist Frans Vera's concept called "rewilding," but there was a lot about old-growth forests in it: "Today thick, dense forests are considered synonymous with unspoiled nature," but old-growth is "a human artifact: an unnatural, unbalanced outcome created when people...corralled wild horses and cattle. Without free-roaming herds of grazing animals to hold them back, closed-canopy forests took over the land wherever humans did not intervene."

It's an intriguing concept, though one that takes away a little of the romance of all those Grimm tales, and maybe some of the enchanting mystery of Twilight. In the Grimms' tales and in Meyer's tale, the woods are dangerous, haunted by wolves or witches or other unknown terrors. But, if Vera's theory is to be believed, the dark and dangerous woods were created by human activity; we gave the monsters a place to hide.

What a poignant metaphor that is! Twilight doesn't spend a lot of time delving into any kind of psychological exploration, and it barely scratches the surface of the primordial roots of vampire tales throughout human history, but who wants that kind of boring stuff in a fantasy novel?

And Twilight is that: pure fantasy. It's the kind of novel that's a lot of fun if you don't think about it very much, and maybe even more fun if you do.