Midnight Sun: The reviewer's cut
An incomplete record of times I audibly groaned while reading the new Twilight
Last week Sian asked me if I wanted to review the new Twilight: a rewrite of the old Twilight, 15 years after it was published, from the vampire’s point of view. I replied, “Hahahahaha oh my god yes.” Then, to be clear: “YES.”
We agreed I would file my review Wednesday morning after receiving the book by courier on Tuesday. Then I saw the book.
Midnight Sun was twice the width of my letterbox. It was bigger than the three biggest books I owned, one of which is literally the history of the ocean.
“Oh my god,” I messaged Sian with a photo. “Sian. Did you realise.” She replied with an expletive. “Big words?” she said. I checked. “No!” She told me to take my time with the review.
And so I settled in – with some trepidation, but an open mind.
In reviewing something like Midnight Sun, intensely anticipated by a particular group of people but dismissed or derided by many, many more, the challenge is how to serve both. The internet delights in hatchet jobs, even of releases that no one expects much of, or that are unanimously agreed to be bad.
Making fun of Twilight, for an audience that thought of it only as faintly ludicrous wish fulfilment for teenage girls, would be the lowest of low-hanging fruit. But the temptation was to be resisted, just like that sumptuous apple on the cover.
Sometimes the collective thirst for schadenfreude can lead writers to “yuck someone else’s yum” – to be critical of something that might not objectively be very good, but that a lot of people like. Especially when the target audience is young, it can feel like punching down; as a late-in-life Directioner, I try to be conscious of the line. (Making fun of Paul Thomas Anderson is punching up, actually.)
The trouble with Midnight Sun was figuring out who the target audience was supposed to be. Though I am about the right age to be a Twihard, I was more Twicurious, coming to the first book years late and seeing only two of the films. But even at that casual level of the engagement, Midnight Sun covers too much of the same ground, then digs deep into details that had been rightfully glossed over.
These two sentences in Twilight:
While he walked me to English, when he met me after Spanish, all through the lunch hour, he questioned me relentlessly about every insignificant detail of my existence. Movies I’d liked and hated, the few places I’d been and the many places I wanted to go, and books – endlessly books.
…are expanded into pages of painstaking back-and-forth in Midnight Sun, with specifics that only the most diehard Twihards could care about, 15 years later. (Even Bella rolls her eyes – “still doubting my interest levels,” chides Edward.) I could understand the bid to capitalise on their childhood nostalgia – but why not with a new narrative?
Coupled with author Stephenie Meyer’s stated misgivings about Midnight Sun (“a huge, pain-in-the-butt book to write”), it is hard to see why it exists other than as a cash grab. As such: my conscience is clean in dunking on it a little bit. (My actual review is here.)
Midnight Sun: My own eternal forever
“There was no evidence of any kind of danger… aside from myself.”
“I put on a CD of violent music.”
“Did I want Bella to be attracted to me, a woman to a man? That was the wrong question. The right question was should I want Bella to be attracted to me that way, and the answer was no. Because I was not a human man.”
“The long sweater was too big for her, unflattering. It masked her slender figure, turning all her delicate curves and soft lines into a shapeless jumble. … It was better – essential – that I kept my thoughts far, far away from that shape, so I was grateful for the unbecoming sweater.”
“She wore a dark, coffee-coloured turtleneck today. It was not tight, but still fitted closely to her shape, and I missed the ugly sweater.”
“I put on my favourite calming CD.”
“Your favourite movie?”
She thought about her answer for a brief moment.
“I’m not sure I can pick just one.” …
“Tell me when you think of them,” I suggested as we walked towards her English class. “While you consider that, tell me what your favourite scent is.”
“I stared at Bella, watching the blood spreading across her cheekbones, noticing not how that made my throat flame, but rather how it brightened her fair face, how it set off the cream of her skin.
“The waitress was waiting for something from me. Ah, she’d asked for our drink order. I continued to gaze at Bella, and the waitress grudgingly turned to look at her, too.”
“‘For almost ninety years I’ve walked among my kind, and yours, all the time thinking I was complete in myself, not realising what I was seeking, and not finding anything… because you weren’t alive yet.’
“I felt her breath against my skin as she whispered her response: ‘It hardly seems fair. I haven’t had to wait at all.’”
What I’ve been working on
‘The maternal complex is so deep-seated in the psyche’: One book I can recommend is Burnt Sugar, by Avni Doshi: a sharp, unsettling novel about a deeply difficult mother-daughter relationship that I’m still thinking about weeks later. Shortly after I interviewed Doshi, Burnt Sugar was announced as one of the long-listed books for the Booker prize – a triumphant end to eight years of revisions (and an inspiration to aspiring authors to persevere with a good idea through terrible drafts). It is also mentioned in (aforementioned editor) Sian Cain’s excellent essay on the growing “childfree” movement in the Guardian Review. I have been recommended this LRB piece on the same subject, but, at 9100 words, it has been lingering untouched in my open tabs for nearly a month. Let me know whether I should close it?!
‘That big Triffid thing – it could be one of those?’: It sounds like the opening to an exceptional sci-fi: some thousands of people around the world receive unsolicited packages of mystery seeds in the post. Bio-warfare would be a novel twist to 2020 – but a more likely explanation is a “brushing scam”, where people are sent items unsolicited by online sellers to generate a transaction to support fake reviews, boosting their businesses. You’re advised against planting them, though.
‘In the battle to New Zealand Covid-free, the ‘team of five million’ has turned against Kiwis overseas’: I don’t often write opinion pieces because I believe if you publish your viewpoint, you should be prepared to defend it; and the thought of fielding often angry correspondence on why I’m wrong about a topic is usually enough to cool my enthusiasm – but I was really disappointed by Jacinda Ardern’s government’s decision to charge citizens for quarantine. There are plenty of New Zealanders overseas who need to go back, but who can’t go back for good; by charging them a minimum of $3100 (£1500), their government has put them in an even tighter spot during the pandemic. As one Kiwi told me: “It means I won’t see my wife and children until this thing is over, I guess.”
Further reading
Who am I prepared to kill? (London Review of Books): This is one of those deeply satisfying essays that contains a typically sprawling truism – in this case, that social media is fostering division – and drills down into it to reach a new level of clarity. By the end of it, I felt like I understood online discourse and our “society of perpetual referendums” better. The same goes for this excellent BuzzFeed analysis on the tech companies really culpable for “cancel culture” and this Cut profile of Sarah Schulman, the author of Conflict is Not Abuse.
Ask culture, versus guess culture (Tumblr/Metafilter): At its best, social media has a novel-esque way of giving voice to what you thought were your private observations alone. This Tumblr-post-about-a-Metafilter-thread, shared by my Facebook friend Nell, does just that, with a theory on why some people feel comfortable making requests others wouldn’t dream of – “There are two types of people”–style.
The unspoken limits to polite conversation – the assumptions underpinning them, the hierarchies they might serve – have been a recurring subject of discussion in my flat since we started watching Netflix’s Love on the Spectrum. Personally I do not think Maddi needed to be steered away from her hard no to the question of wanting kids – and I was grateful to read this piece by Marianne Eloise, on her response to the show’s neurotypical gaze.No Flak Jacket Required: In Defence Of Phil Collins (The Quietus): I came upon this 10-year-old essay in the wake of the very charming viral video showing teens listening to In The Air Tonight for the first time. I have listened to an uncharacteristic amount of Phil Collins during lockdown as “downbeat yacht rock” was my audio moodboard for months three to four, though I generally agree with Gary Mills that “Collins’ ingenuity as a solo artist began and ended inside three minutes, and within one song.” If your mind immediately goes to the deer, sorry to say, the internet has broken you. (I think of the Cadbury gorilla, revealing me to be basic. Truly, there are two types of people.)