This review is riddled with spoilers like Swiss cheese is riddled with holes. If you want to fully enjoy the Twilight series then refrain from reading it until you have tackled the 754 page behemoth that is…
Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer (2/5)
Not since I made it half way through Crash, a book in which the principal characters are sexually aroused by car crashes, have I read anything quite so disturbing.
As with its predecessors, Breaking Dawn is a testimony to the power of love, however this time it focuses on the pain people are willing to endure in its name.
Once they are married Edward whisks Bella away to an island off the coast of Brazil for a romantic honeymoon/ to be date raped. It is only due to the power of love that, when Bella wakes up in a broken bed, covered in bruises and down from the pillows that Edward has bitten through, she doesn’t press charges. After all it’s what she wanted, even if she can’t remember most of it.
Unfortunately for Bella her sparkly vampire who doesn’t produce any bodily fluids is firing on all cylinders in one department and it isn’t long before she’s been impregnated with his hellspawn. Once again it is down to the power of love that, with the foetus growing at an alarming rate and cracking ribs as it goes, no one thinks to abort the violent little half-breed.
During the pregnancy the baby forces Bella to start drinking human blood and it isn’t until the blighter decides to snap Bella’s spine that Edward performs a cesarean section, with his teeth. Stephenie Meyer has managed to create a pregnancy scene that is so horrific it should be required reading on abstinence-only programmes across America.
The baby’s first action, it’s a girl by the way, is to bite Bella. Yes, the infant tries to drink her own mother, which is rather harsh considering Bella is already on her deathbed. Cue Edward injecting vampire venom directly into her heart and veins to save her.
With Bella busy writhing in agony on the Cullen’s sofa and Edward busy wringing his hands and generally being pathetic it is down to the literary third wheel that is Jacob Black to narrate the second part of the story.
This secondary perspective is incongruous with the previous three books and serves little purpose, perhaps only saving Stephenie from having to write with any kind of emotional intensity as Bella goes through an immense amount of pain for the vampire and the baby she loves.
The wolves want to destroy the hellspawn, Jacob doesn’t and forms his own pack. The wolves don’t attack the vampires. With this non-plot out of the way it’s time to return to the real story narrated by Bella who is now a fully fledged vampire. She has decided to call her baby Renesmee because being half vampire isn’t enough, you have to get bullied at school as well.
The events of part one forgotten, everyone now loves Renesmee the magical talking baby, some people a little too much. When Leah (a character so insignificant I’ve never even mentioned her before) joined Jacob’s pack I figured they’d get together; they both have an unrequited love and could have had lots of fun licking their wounds together. Unfortunately, Stephenie decides to have Jacob develop a weird werewolf crush on a child barely out of the womb. Yes, Jacob hates bloodsuckers and said Bella would be dead to him when she became a vampire but don’t let the facts get in the way of a mediocre story.
In contrast with part one, in which Bella suffered an obscene amount of pain, in part three she has it way too easy. As a new vampire she has complete control over her raging bloodlust, even getting to meet her human father, and has morphed from a clumsy girl into a agile vamp with super powers. To top it all off the Cullens have even built her and Edward a sex cottage (seriously).
It is at this point that Stephenie Meyer should have called it quits and hit the publish button on FanFiction.Net. Unfortunately, she didn’t and the reason why is the same reason as ever. At some stage someone (whose name if ever revealed will be cursed through the ages) bought Stephenie a how-to book on novel writing as a last minute gift. Chapter three of this book is probably called something like “Plot: Your Story Should Have One”, unfortunately Meyer possesses a rare genetic mutation that makes this chapter invisible to her until she is at least three quarters of the way through writing her novel.
Roll plot. The leaders of the vampire world the Volturi have heard of Renesmee, unfortunately they think she is a crazy vampire baby with an insatiable hunger instead of a half human child who is exploring far beyond her expected reading grade.
Knowing that the Volturi will kill the baby and punish those responsible, the Cullens begin to assemble a collection of witnesses to testify that the baby is half human. There are 30 odd vampire witnesses that turn up, each of these characters is as paper thin as the next (they are all listed alphabetically by coven in the vampire index but there’s no point reading this because none of these characters develop the plot in any way).
After the new arrivals have spent a while showing off their powers (the ones that stand out being the ability to control the elements and to taser your enemies) and practising for the epic battle that will inevitably ensue the Volturi show up. Unfortunately, Meyer disappoints on this count too and the entire dispute is peacefully resolved using the “super power” that is diplomacy.
So by the end of page 754 (“And then we continued blissfully into this small but perfect piece of our forever.”) the reader is back to where they were on 387. The Cullens are content and the Volturi have returned to Italy where they can continue to be morally ambiguous in peace.
An all too neat ending to a disappointing series that was nonetheless compulsive reading. This is the final nail in the coffin of the Twilight series and I promise to give you at least a month to recover before I even contemplate reviewing any more fiction.
Related Posts
Twilight: Cheaper Than Heroin
New Moon: A Remarkable Achievement
Eclipse: Now With Added Plot
She has decided to call her baby Renesmee because being half vampire isn’t enough, you have to get bullied at school as well.
–That line actually made me laugh out loud. I know I could technically have written LOL but the actual meaning of that has been somewhat lost through overuse.
I haven’t read the books at all (although I did see the first film, incredibly funny long scenes of teenagers staring at each other while having fabulous hair) but they do seem to raise some interesting psychological theories about the author. Sounds like some fairly ambivalent feelings about childbirth for a start.
I hope my reviews have encouraged you to read this trilogy of four :P Using these books to understand Stephenie Meyer is interesting, especially when you realise she’s a Mormon, as I commented on the Facebook note (which seems to be the medium of choice for most of my blog readers);
“The Mormon angle didn’t get covered [in my review] because it still confuses me – vampires make a mockery of religion, their blood drinking being a parody of Holy Communion, they don’t like crosses, holy water and communion wafer (according to Bram Stoker’s Dracula) and yet Meyer just seems to remove all the aspects she doesn’t like of the vampire character and then has one as a main character who she keeps referring to as an angel.”
In Breaking Dawn Meyer goes further and at one stage Bella says she’d rather be with Edward for all eternity than go to heaven, which is a weird statement for any Christian writer to be making (especially as Bella gets her wish and there are no negative consequences).
I’ve actually heard there is going to be another book that will retell Twilight but from Edwards perspective. That’s a self indulgent author move if ever there was one.
Well religion is never about stuff that makes sense anyway, it’s about meeting emotional needs which is why athiests such as myself get so frustrated trying to make sense of the logic there. It’s not like she’s the first author to revamp vamps to meet her own wishes either although the sparkly skin seems to be fairly controversial.
I might have to look for a religious analysis of the Twilight books, that’s my idea of fun :-)
Yes Twilight retold is going to be called Midnight Sun, Stephenie discusses it on her site (http://www.stepheniemeyer.com/midnightsun.html) and shares the 264 page rough draft that had been previously leaked. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly she says she might come back to it in a few years when everyone has forgotten about it but for now she’s working on a story about mermaids (http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20234559_20234567_20238527_3,00.html).
Snap on the religion front, hence the post that follows directly after this one (http://www.scribbleboy.co.uk/2009/01/31/atheist-bible-study/) although I’ve left this one for a while because it frustrated me so much. My main problem with trying to explain the first two pages of the Bible (if we ignore dinosaurs, the big bang, evolution, why God who is complete would create something new, defining the word day and explaining the tree of knowledge) is Satan.
Supposedly the serpent in the Garden of Eden is Satan because Satan is compared to a serpent in Revelations. Here’s my problem, Genesis written 1200ish BC by one person, Exodus written 70ish AD by another (just pulled those dates from Google so they might not be that reliable but they illustrate my point).
Plus if the serpent is Satan then he would need to have fallen to be able to tempt Eve, sometime between Genesis 1:31 (“Then God saw everything He had made, and indeed it was very good.”) and him tempting Eve 3:1 (that’s a timeframe of half a page and it’s bizarre that such a key event is not mentioned).
The fall of Lucifer is covered in Isaiah (a book I haven’t had the pleasure of reading yet) but as Lucifer was the name they used to refer to a shooting star it all sounds a bit dodgy :/
I honestly can’t understand how Christians rationally think about the bible. Especially the ones who try to act as though the bible is a totally true history.
I saw on TV this one guy in America who was trying to prove that the Turin Shroud was genuine. Apparently lots of people believe it isn’t because the nail holes are in the palms and crucifixion victims were nailed at the wrists because nails in the palm can’t support the weight of a person. So this guy built a crucifix in his garage and got his son….stay with me here,it’s wacky rather than sick… he got his son to put on these gloves which had a metal reinforced hole between the middle two fingers, not going through the hand at all. He nailed his son up there with the nails through these holes for about 5 seconds and then proclaimed that he’d proved the shroud of Turin was real. He honestly didn’t see any flaw in his experiment.
I’ve heard that the serpent was only made into Satan because they wanted a bigger villain for Christianity, they being the early fathers of the church. You’ve got to agree the best films are the ones with the best villains. Star Wars would be nothing without Darth Vadar!
I’ve always very much liked the name Lucifer though. Probably for the best I’ll never come to name a child.