Midnight Sun by Stephenie Meyer review – dusk falls on Twilight saga
Set aside the millions of copies sold, the controversies over both its sexual overtones and its lack of actual sex, and the blockbuster film franchise and celebrity careers it spawned: Twilight told a simple story, one nearly as old as its immortal antihero. Vampire meets girl. Vampire wants to bite girl. Girl wants to be bitten, but vampire must resist, for the girl’s own good. “I refuse to damn you to an eternity of night,” Edward tells Bella firmly, “and that’s the end of it.”
Actually, that’s only the end of book one in Stephenie Meyer’s bestselling four-part series. Vampire and girl settle for some heavy necking – and some agonised yearning, which they seem to enjoy just as much.
As was made explicit when the story was wrung dry of teen pheromones and repurposed as Fifty Shades of Grey, what fuelled the Twilight phenomenon 15 years ago was the ecstasy of delayed gratification, and the pleasure to be found in pain.
Neither apply to the experience of reading Midnight Sun, Meyer’s longawaited project, which has been described as a “companion” novel to the first instalment, this time retold from Edward’s perspective rather than Bella’s. Early chapters of the book were leaked in 2008, prompting Meyer to put the project on hold. But 12 years later, the novel is out – and, at more than 750 pages, it is immediately clear why it took her so long.
The key difference between Twilight, narrated by Bella, and Midnight Sun, narrated by Edward, is the latter’s special vampire skill of hearing other people’s thoughts (though not Bella’s, contributing to her appeal). His sister Alice sees visions of the future and both skills function quite prosaically as plot devices as Edward listens in on people thinking about Bella, or grills Alice about what is going to happen to her. This, any Twihard already knows from Twilight. But Edward’s agonising over his urge to bite the new girl at school is supposed to lend the story a dark new twist. Instead, by page 150 he is hopelessly in love with her, and the feeling is soon reciprocated. The next 600 pages feel a bit like being sat uncomfortably close to a young couple who won’t stop kissing.
It would be hard for any reader to find Bella as fascinating as Edward does, with her character, never very distinctive, now smothered by his adoring gaze (“the English language needed a word that meant something halfway between a goddess and a naiad”). But taken together, the two narratives at least depict mutual attraction. Midnight Sun could be read as Meyer’s attempt at a do-over, following criticism of Twilight for romanticising a coercive relationship. Edward’s habit of breaking into Bella’s bedroom to watch her sleep, for example, was held up by some highly literal commentators as modelling unhealthy boundaries to impressionable young women, who were still learning how to navigate their own relationships with vampires. (As Meyer pointed out in a recent interview: “Really the problem is that he’s murdered a ton of people.”)
In Midnight Sun, we learn that Edward at least feels guilty about the surveillance, almost more than the slaughter: “I was repulsed by myself as I watched her toss again. How was I any better than some sick peeping tom? I wasn’t any better. I was much, much worse.”
Unfortunately, Midnight Sun does not make for gripping reading, nor significantly expand Meyer’s vampiric lore, an obvious missed opportunity when writing from Edward’s perspective. It feels below the belt to criticise the quality of the writing, given that Twilight was never loved for that – but there is something to be said for editing. Midnight Sun is chronically overwritten, plodding along almost in real time. Nine whole pages are given over to a chat about their likes and dislikes: Bella’s favourite gemstone is whichever one matches Edward’s eyes, while he analyses Linkin Park lyrics for clues to unlock his lady love: “It didn’t seem to match any of her moods that I’d seen, but then, there was so much I didn’t know.”
Despite its door-stopper density, Midnight Sun does not amplify the original novel. At times, it even undermines it. The whole appeal of a vampire-boyfriend is that he is deadly and undead, but Midnight Sun just exposes how toothless Edward really is. Meyer has described him as an anxious character, and says that writing him exacerbated her own anxiety – one of the reasons Midnight Sun was a “huge, pain in the butt book to write … Every single word was a struggle.” Why, then, are there so many of them?
The weight of expectation might have gotten to Meyer, given that Midnight Sun is not a new narrative. But it wasn’t until I had finished reading it and dug out a copy of Twilight that I realised quite how much overlap there is. The two books are almost exactly the same, down to scenes, dialogue and viewpoint. Compare Bella, in Twilight:
“I looked down at my dress, fidgeting with a stray piece of chiffon. He waited in silence.” And Edward, in Midnight Sun: “She looked down at her beautiful dress, tugging absently on a chiffon ruffle. I knew what was coming. I let her find the words she wanted.”
It is inexplicable why Meyer chose to limit herself so when she has said sticking to the blueprint of Twilight was the toughest part of writing Midnight Sun. “The best parts to write, hands down, were the times that Bella was not present, and I wasn’t locked into a certain set of dialogues and actions,” she recently said. Her publishers, at least, are confident, with a huge initial print run and global release. But moving from Bella to Edward could be a less dramatic shift in perspective than that undergone by the Twihards over the last 15 years, now mostly in their 30s and finding themselves reading the same book. Will they readily be swept away by a vampire-meets-girl love story? It is hard to imagine when they’ve already read it.