In Which I Read Twilight: Chapter 1 -- First Blood · 9:32pm Dec 16th, 2017
Technically, this isn’t the first chapter; there’s a few-paragraph “preface” before it. But I only needed to read a few words to know that it was from the climax of the book. Why include it? I don’t know anyone in it, there’s no context, and it’s not long enough to get me invested in an in medias res thing. Also, a hunter is described as “sauntering” to his would-be kill for some reason. I skipped it.
Our story starts with Bella moving from Phoenix to Forks, Washington, the rainiest place in America, for some as-yet unexplained reason, and when Bella describes Forks, the narration suddenly shifts from past tense to present tense. It’s jarring and doesn’t really serve a purpose. Bella also describes Forks as the place from which “my mother escaped with me when I was only a few months old”. Keep this in mind. Her father Charlie, police chief of Forks, meets her at the airport. He’s trying really hard to make her feel welcome, so he’s already bought her a truck. Bella loves it, believe it or not.
I’m probably going to catch heat for this, but these first few character introductions are actually pretty smooth. There’s more showing than telling, minimal exposition, and the exposition that is there is incomplete enough to let you fill in the blanks yourself. It’s a lot better than I was expecting. And some of the mood being created is alright:
It was beautiful, of course; I couldn’t deny that. Everything was green; the trees, their trunks covered with moss, their branches hanging with a canopy of it, the ground covered with ferns. Even the air filtered down greenly through the leaves.
It was too green — an alien planet.
I’m from Michigan, where you have at least one tree if there’s an square yard of open earth for it to take root. I felt similar feelings when I drove through Nebraska and saw the Great Plains: how can a place be so open and have so few trees? For a first impression of such a supposedly terrible book, this isn’t so bad.
That being said, it’s not great, either. Bella is a whiner and comes off as extremely cold. I mean, listen to this reaction when Charlie’s describing how he got the truck:
“Do you remember Billy Black down at La Push?” La Push is the tiny Indian reservation on the coast.
“No.”
“He used to go fishing with us during the summer,” Charlie prompted.
That would explain why I didn’t remember him. I do a good job of blocking painful, unnecessary things from my memory.
Even if you didn’t like it, a fishing trip with your father is “painful, unnecessary”? Geez louise, lady, stop sounding like he tortured your kittens to death. And this sort of whining pops up a lot. She even complains that she has to share a bathroom with Charlie. Is that usually a thing to complain about? I shared a bathroom for most of my life with three other brothers and it worked out fine as long as we used it one at a time.
She’s also supposed to be self-conscious about her appearance, but describes herself as “ivory-skinned”. Uh-huh. In fact, first lesson learned from Twilight: the implications caused by word choice can say a lot. Is the sailor who hangs back from the stormy coast “cautious” or “timid”? Heck, I once wrote a story where a romance broke up because of this, sort of. (“It took me too long to realize that ‘fun-loving’ and ‘carefree’ are just synonyms for ‘hedonistic’ and ‘irresponsible’.”)
Anyway, Bella describes herself with the worn cliche of looking in the mirror to view herself. The “look in the mirror for physical description” bit is one of those things that, like the morning routine, is something that’s so tired it should only be done if there’s something special about it, like the way Douglas Adams handled it in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:
At eight o’clock on Thursday morning Arthur didn’t feel very good. He woke up blearily, got up, wandered blearily round his room, opened a window, saw a bulldozer, found his slippers, and stomped off to the bathroom to wash.
And last time I checked, Stephenie Meyer, you’re not Douglas Adams.
Bella goes to school, and it passes pretty uneventfully. Bella makes some friends: Eric, Jessica, Mike, Angela. She’s nervous about her new school, yadda yadda. During lunch, she sees the Cullens and Hales, who are so frigging hot like whoa. They’re somehow newcomers to Forks, too, even though they’ve been in Forks for two years (they moved down from Alaska). Edward Cullen shares biology class with Bella, during which he tries to sit as far away from her as possible (they share the same lab table) and shoots her a few angry glares. At the end of the day, Bella runs into Edward again as he tries to get his biology class period changed, but he stops and leaves as soon as he sees here.
In all, not as bad a first chapter as I was expecting, but still not great or even that good. Pretty slow and predictable. Still, it was tolerable. Let’s hope it remains tolerable.
Oh, this is gonna be good. :3