The Twilight Saga: A Romantic Fantasy
I’ve always been a fan of romance. There was a time when Mills & Boon, Silhouette romances were literally my bread and butter. But I got over them soon and switched to action packed adventures, spy thrillers, sci-fi thrillers and never looked back – until now.
I stumbled upon the Twilight series, when I was looking for a fantasy series similar to JK Rowling’s Harry Potter. HP literally spoiled me for other books for quite some time because I couldn’t find that kind of fantasy and magic anywhere else. Suddenly murder mysteries and thrillers seemed very boring. What would I not have given for another fantasy series with the same brilliance !!
Although the common bond is fantasy in both works, JK Rowling and Stephanie Meyer handle the series quite differently. While the HP series is more of a grown-up book of sorts, where you can really feel the characters grow and mature with each passing year, Twilight has characters that are literally frozen in time and the genre is more romance interwoven with fantasy.
Stephanie Meyer’s storytelling has none of the simplicity and brilliance of JK Rowling (maybe something to do with the fact that she’s English!) It’s a bit fiddly and drags in places where it could have been shorter. However, his words create a vivid image in your mind. You become Bella Swan and when she faints upon seeing Edward Cullen, you faint along with her. There is extraordinary brightness to some of its chapters, while some small portions definitely lack the same brightness.
The characters in the books are just too sweet; Bella Swan, the strangely intuitive but clumsy and simple girl who falls madly in love with a vampire; Edward Cullen, the beautiful vampire who can’t help but love Bella and, of course, want her irresistible blood and one of my favorite characters, and for many people I’m sure, the reddish werewolf, Jacob Black. He earns the affection of his readers simply by being himself: warm, cheeky, irascible, loyal and loving to the end and not to mention Bella’s hapless human father Charlie Swan, caught in the middle of all this fantasy and yet keeping your strength. with only his love and concern for Bella.
Edward Cullen is literally too good to be true. His love for Bella, which almost feels like devotion to a goddess, is straight out of a fairy tale (something Bella contemplates herself, from time to time). He gives her everything she wants and would have given Jacob if that was what she would have wanted (and if Stephanie Meyer had the heart to do it, of course). In the end, most of the loose ends are tied up with Jacob’s ‘imprint’ on Bella and Edward’s mixed-race daughter Renesmee conveniently, solving the triangular love affair easily.
When I said most of the loose ends, I meant it intentionally, as some characters are still half reconciled and you have a feeling that there is more to come. Like for example, what happens to Leah Clearwater, the glutton-man, who decides to join Jacob’s pack and seems to take care of a soft corner for him? And there’s Nahuel, another half human and half vampire who may be a competition for Jacob later for Renesmee’s hand. There is also an invitation from Zafrina, the Amazon vampire who insists that Bella visit her rainforest along with Renesmee at some point. While these are trivial, there is the constant threat of ‘the Volturi’ who would never accept implicit defeat at the hands of the ‘vegetarian’ vampires of the Carlisle family. Will they go back and face the vampires of the Forks one by one? Will Jacob and Renesmee really need to run this time? Would they probably run to the rainforests of the Amazon? What will happen to Edward and Bella then?
Maybe Stephanie herself has these questions in mind and comes out with a new book, ‘The New Dawn’ or whatever, if not a fifth sequel to the Twilight series. Just maybe!