Discrepancies (Pg. 3-13)

We begin the actual book with a dream. It’s an interesting dream too, and we should all know that if an author is going to write a dream it’s important for the story, otherwise why bother. It’s based on word economy and the old trope of Chekov’s gun. If it’s there a payoff is inevitable. The trouble with that is Meyer seems to be quite unreliable in this concept. The last book gave us hundreds of mentions that Bella was clumsy and it seemed that the only reason for that was to set up an excuse at the end of the book for her injuries, and it was a lame excuse at that. We’ve heard of unreliable narrators but what we have here is an unreliable author and that’s troubling. Yet we’ve read this kind of thing before with Dan Brown and the Da Vinci Code so it’s nothing new.

Anyway the dream has a disembodied Bella looking at an image of her dead grandmother and then Edward appears behind the grandmother. It turns out that this isn’t her grandmother but her in the future as Edward hasn’t aged a bit. Filling Bella with a sort of worry makes a lot of sense and perhaps the payout for this dream isn’t plot wise it’s character wise. This is good, a very good start. It’s akin to the sequence in the movie version of “The Two Towers” where Elrond explains to Arwen why she should abandon Aragorn. It works here as well as there, but the atmosphere of futility was much better in Jackson’s movie, that’s ok as this book is for a different, and younger audience.

What the dream sets up is that there is going to be an issue between the two of age. Which is about as realistic as a story about relationships with vampires is going to get. This issue was brought up a little bit in the first book, but not to any serious satisfaction. Edward in the dream has a curious aspect to his character, “Edward stood beside me, casting no reflection.”

The lack of reflection is wholly new. It was never brought up previously when Bella was researching her crush, in any of the intra-vampire discussions nor in the list of attributes brought up with regard to the special superpowers that each individual vampire possessed. We might be able to forgive this omission but it seems to be quite important since all of the Cullen "children" go to high school and Dr. Cullen works in a hospital. No one has ever noticed that they don't cast a reflection? All of the children would be required to participate in Gym class and that would entail showering with other people and then fixing themselves up, for their impeccable appearance, in a room with a large mirror. It also raises another interesting questions and that is whether or not they can be photographed.* School pictures, hospital ID badges, and sometimes in an OR procedures are recorded. The Cullens can probably escape picture day, but with the advent of cell phone cameras it would be kind of hard. Especially since they are so good looking. The Doctor is going to have some explaining to do when it comes to his ID badge.

The standard explanation given for the lack of reflection is that they are creatures of anathema to nature. They don't cast reflections because nothing can abide their presence, which is why dogs bark at them etc. Mirrors are abhorrent to them because the lack of reflection reminds them of what they once were in reference to what they are now. This is a factor that Meyer has discarded but he's still not showing a reflection so we are going to need an explanation for it. Perhaps they dodge the business with mass hypnosis, or even more realistically psychological explanation. The reason we think that a coin flipped eight times landing on heads all eight is "due" for a tails. Or if you look at a person with no eye brows, you realize something is wrong with their face, but you can't quite place it because you are used to eyebrows being on everyone it is almost as if you do see them. 

The reason for all of Bella's doubt is that today is her 18th birthday. She's officially an adult that can buy cigarettes, lotto tickets, and pornography. What it also means is that she's older than Edward, "I was eighteen and Edward never would be." Well, yes and no. Sure he would never age biologically beyond and eighteen year old, but he is certainly physically older than 18. Mentally probably not.

She gets to school and sees Edward by his shiny Volvo "like a marble tribute to some forgotten pagan god of beauty." We tired of this in the last book and I guess it's going to continue. The troubling thing about the last novel and it seems this one as well, is that we are offered no reason to think Bella should be going out with him other than his looks. I suppose this means that Meyer hasn't thought of any good reason either so she's sticking with appearance. He stands there and next to him is Alice. I said last post that Alice was my favorite character in the series so far. Not only does she have good characterization and is an actual likeable person but she also brings levity into the situation. Edward and Bella get right into brooding, and Alice interjects by reminding Bella that 18 isn't old. That isn't the point of course, and I think that Alice gets that, what I believe she's doing is reminding Bella that now isn't the time for wondering about impending morality.

Bella also has another problem the birthday is going to put her into the spotlight that "any other accident-prone klutz would agree. [That] no one wants a spotlight when they're bound to fall on their face." This is entirely unnecessary. Meyer should have taken the pseudo-clumsiness out of the story since it already served its purpose before. Putting it back in just means we have to hear about it more. Further based on what we know about Bella, we already know that she will pretend to not want the spotlight. The klutz thing is superfluous.

It's also established that this is a new school year, the beginning of their senior year. Bella has a job at a sporting goods store, even though this would be the worst place for her to work, and the manager must have been paid off or hypnotized into hiring her, she is not planning on going to college, "college was plan B. I was still hoping for plan A, but Edward was just so stubborn about leaving me human."

This is your role model girls? She's willing to sacrifice her future, any possibility where she could learn on her own or develop some actual skills at something, for a man. This is the same despicable theme that ran through "Sex and the City," that a woman's importance is only about landing a husband. Although in the HBO series it was all about a rich husband here that's not so overt but since Edward is already rich I guess it's still there.

The Cullens are rich too, Bella brings this up when fantasizing about being a Cullen in reference to her working class roots. They had a plethora of money that came from Carlisle's unlimited life and "a sister who had an uncanny ability to predict trends in the stock market." Bravo! Someone finally uses a person with the future sight to do something obvious with it. Of course it would be easier with regard to sports outcomes since the payoff would be almost immediate, but this is a nice touch. Most vampires are obscenely wealthy but their wealth isn't usually explained. In the Blade series it's not really touched upon, neither in the Underworld series, but here we get it. They exploited the psychic. Makes sense.

The other thing to note is that Bella uses "sister" and not "daughter" in reference to Alice. This is curious because she considers the money, the house, and the life she wants to be Edward's and not Carlisle's, or the Cullens'. She's pretty much obliterated any reference to herself here as well. The only real assertion of her person that she makes is when she talks about how she's "out of balance" with regard to Edward buying her things and how she would like him to stop. All of this is done in an air of how superior he is to her, making it that much worse. Even though she says she actually objects to his paying for things like dinner, a car, college, it's not him being a control freak or anything like that. It's about how much better he is than her, even though he "for some unfathomable reason, wanted to be with me."

Well that sucks, because I was hoping our protagonists had changed for the better but we've seen that she hasn't. Let's hope he has. 

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*Check out an old BBC series (90s I think) called Ultraviolet where vampire hunters exploited this using video cameras to hunt their quarry. It's unrelated to an incomprehensible Milla Jovovich movie of the same name.