The Twilight Saga – A Romantic Fantasy
I’ve always been a sucker for romance. There was a time when Mills & Boon, Silhouette romances were literally my bread and butter. But I gave them up early and switched to action-packed adventures, spy thrillers, sci-fi thrillers and never looked back, until now.
I came across the Twilight series, when I was looking for a fantasy series similar to JK Rowling’s Harry Potter. HP literally spoiled me for any other book for quite some time because I couldn’t find that kind of fantasy and magic anywhere else. Suddenly, murder mystery thrillers seemed so boring. What I wouldn’t have given for another fantasy series with the same brilliance!!
Although the common link is fantasy in both works, JK Rowling and Stephanie Meyer handle the series quite differently. While the HP series is more of a growth book type, where you can feel the characters grow and mature with each passing year, Twilight has characters that are literally frozen in time and the genre is more of a romance interwoven with fantasy.
Stephanie Meyer’s narration doesn’t have the simplicity and brilliance of JK Rowling (perhaps it has something to do with the fact that she’s English!) However, her words create a vivid image in your mind. You become Bella Swan and when she faints at the sight of Edward Cullen, you faint along with her. There is an extraordinary brilliance in some of the chapters of it, while some small parts definitely lack the same brilliance.
The characters in the books are just too sweet; Bella Swan, the strangely intuitive but awkward and unassuming girl who falls madly in love with a vampire; Edward Cullen, the beautiful vampire who can’t help but love Bella and of course crave her irresistible blood from her and one of my favorite characters, and for many people, I’m sure, the reddish werewolf, Jacob Black . He endears himself to his readers simply by being himself: warm, brash, temperamental, 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 it. your strength. with just 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 herself contemplates from time to time). He gives her everything she wants and would have given Jacob if that is what she 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 ‘imprinting’ on Bella and Edward’s half-caste daughter, Renesmee conveniently, resolving the triangular love entanglement easily.
When I said most of the loose ends, I meant intentionally as some characters are still half-reconciled and you have a feeling there is more to come. Like, for example, what happens to Leah Clearwater the wolverine, who decides to join Jacob’s pack and seems to guard a soft corner for him? And there’s Nahuel, another half-human, half-vampire who may be a match for Jacob later for Renesmee’s hand. There is also an invitation from Zafrina, the Amazon vampire who insists that Bella visit her rainforest 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 Carlisle family’s ‘vegetarian’ vampires. Will they return and take on the Forks vampires one by one? Will Jacob and Renesmee really need to run this time? Would they probably run to the Amazon rain forests? What will happen to Edward and Bella then?
Maybe Stephanie herself has these questions on her mind and comes out with a new book, ‘The New Dawn’ or whatever, if not a fifth sequel in the Twilight series. Just maybe!
