BLOGGING NEW MOON, pt. 11: Falcon Can't Hear The Falconer

Previous entries can be found in the directory.

Chapter 8: Adrenaline

On a remote back road, Jacob walks Bella through the steps of operating the motorcycle. It’s not indicated how long he’s been going over it, but Bella seems pretty on top of things.

“I bet she’s on top of things a lot. Like dicks.”-Quil Ateara

There’s a lot of Jacob telling her not to use the footbrake, so obviously at some point she’s going to use it. Chekov once said that if you have a footbrake on the wall in the first act, someone has to step on it in the third.

Bella’s a little nervous, but she doesn’t feel like she should be—“I’d already lived through the worst thing possible,” she says. I’m pretty sure she means getting dumped by Edward, but shouldn’t she mean almost being beaten to death by James in the last book? Get your shit in perspective, Bella. It takes several pages of directions—it’s like a Cormac McCarthy novel for a second—but finally Bella is about to take off. Guess whose disembodied voice comes back?

“This is reckless and childish and idiotic, Bella,” the velvet voice fumed.

SO HOT. Bella lets go of some important piece of machinery and ends up on the ground with the bike on top of her. She realizes it must not be déjà-vu that triggers the Edward Patronus but rather “some combination of adrenaline and danger.” Trial and error: works every time. Bella is a like a scientist in the field of her own fucked-up subconscious.

This whole “discovery” scene is sort of comic, I think. I don’t know how seriously we can possibly take Bella acting like such a nutcase. But it also seems like we’re getting important information. With lines like “Maybe I’d found a way to generate the hallucinations,” it’s hard to know where the jokes end and the plot points begin. Bella gets on the bike again, and has a nice little bon mot to boot:

It took several good tries, and even more poor tries, before the engine caught and roared to life under me.

What a wit you are sometimes, Bella!

“At twilight, nature is not without loveliness, though perhaps its chief use is to illustrate quotations from the vampires.”-Bella Wilde

Ghost Edward starts in again: “Do you want to kill yourself, then?” he asks. Ghost Edward is such a nag! Quit harshing on Bella and Jacob’s mellow, square! There’s a kind of Death of a Salesman moment where Edward says “Go home to Charlie” and Jacob tells her to ease off the clutch and she replies “I will” to both. But not really, because she’s going home to Charlie like, eventually, not right now, and so that's not what Edward asked. It’s a stretch. But I like that S. Meyer is trying to get creative with the staging a little bit. And by “getting creative” I mean “imitating Arthur Miller.”

Bella takes off, and enjoys the flying sensation, but she comes to a turn and panics, slamming down on the footbrake. The bike wobbles beneath her and she reacts too suddenly, bringing it to the ground and crashing into a tree. I made exactly the same mistake on a skateboard one time, trying to impress my friends like an idiot and zooming down a huge hill. I didn’t realize that if I tried to stop by stepping on the ground my foot would just fly out behind me and send me head over heels across the pavement.

Jacob rushes to Bella’s side and asks, kind of hilariously, “Are you alive?” Bella hops up enthusiastically and wants to try again, but Jacob explains that she is bleeding profusely from the head.

“Oh, I’m so sorry Jacob.” I pushed hard against the gash, as if I could force the blood back inside my head.
“Why would you apologize for bleeding?”

That’s a weird echo of Bella’s earlier attempt to apologize to Edward for bleeding, but at this point I think it’s just suggesting that Bella is ridiculous, not trying to drive home the connections between Edward and Jacob. Yet.

Jacob takes off his shirt for the first of, I assume, many times so that Bella can hold it to her head while he gets the bikes back to the truck. He wants to straight to the hospital, but Bella talks him into driving her home so she can clean up first. She wants to make up a new story about how she got hurt so they won’t get in trouble. Should we start counting the domestic abuse imagery? I’m already uncomfortable.

“She uh, fell down some stairs.”-Jacob Black

On the circuitous route to the hospital, Bella philosophizes more. These diatribes are starting to have a kind of insane, ranting quality—like S. Meyer’s been reading Thus Spoke Zarathustra. “And then to discover the key to the hallucinations!” is an actual sentence up in this bitch. Also like Nietzsche, some of it sounds like it was badly translated from another language:

The feel of the wind in my face, the speed and the freedom… it reminded me of a past life, flying through the thick forest without a road, piggyback while HE ran—I stopped thinking right there, letting the memory break off in the sudden agony. I flinched.

So did I. I took the liberty of using Google to translate this passage into Traditional Chinese and then back again to see if it got any better.

Feel the wind in my face, speed and freedom ... it reminds me of a past life, the shuttle is not in a dense forest road, when he ran carrying, I'll be there to stop thinking and memory disruption sudden pain. I am back.

Nope. Bella’s story ends up being that she fell in Jacob’s shed and hit her head on a hammer—after changing at her house they depart for the hospital. Bella observes that Jacob is still shirtless. If Jacob walks into that hospital with no shirt on and Bella is all bloodied up and one of the doctors doesn’t AT LEAST give the police a heads up, I am going to be pissed. It really completes the “Episode of COPS” tableau though, huh?

It’s cold in the car, but Jacob is perfectly comfortable, stripped to the waist though he is. So Edward is freezing cold and Jacob is burning hot, huh? I wonder who would be more unpleasant to have sex with?

Bella remarks that Jacob’s skin is really pretty, but I kind of feel like S. Meyer is trying to convince us that she isn’t racist. On pages 192-4 we get another set of arbitrary breaks between paragraphs. What the fuck is going on with this? Bella does a lot of time-jumping, but only occasionally is it accompanied by a break.

More inexplicable stuff happens:

I had to have seven stitches to close the cut on my forehead. After the sting of the local anesthetic, there was no pain in the procedure. Jacob held my hand while Dr. Snow was sewing, and I tried not to think about why that was ironic.

Why WHAT was ironic? I really don’t get it. Is it ironic that Jacob is holding her hand? If so, why? Is it because the doctor’s name is Snow, and Dr. Cullen is literally cold? Am I overthinking it?

Bella is still having nightmares, still feeling like she’s got a hole in her chest, but it’s not as bad. She and Jacob start riding (the bikes) on the reg, and Bella mentions Charlie’s eyes narrowing in suspicion when she has to tell him about a second “tripping” incident. Thank god someone is finally noticing! She worries that Charlie is going to shut down her trips to La Push, though she’s not worried about no longer seeing Jacob so much as no longer getting to hallucinate. “My velvet voiced delusion has yelled at me for almost five minutes” today, Bella says. What the hell could Edward have said for five straight minutes?

“Bella! Don’t ride that bike! Stop it! Eat more vegetables! Stay in school! Don’t do drugs! Uh, hey, you still haven’t gotten off the bike!”

But Charlie is reassured (for some reason) when Bella tells him the injury occurred hiking. He has a hard time at first believing she actually went hiking, which is fair, because she didn’t. “Mike Newton was bound to rub off on me sometime,” Bella says. Okay, that’s not exactly the line, but do you see how my way is better? Bella promises Charlie she’ll be more careful while “surreptitiously crossing my fingers under the table.” WHAT? Jacob and Bella have been argue-flirting for several chapters about real age—Bella gets ten extra years because she can cook and pays the bills for Charlie, Jacob gets fifteen because of his mechanical skills, etc.—and I think Bella should be docked like, a hundred years for that little move. I don’t even know any five-year-olds who do that seriously!

Nonetheless, Jacob and Bella decide to cool it on the bikes for a while. Faced with a dead-end on the adrenaline rush front, Bella essentially reverts to her earlier hypothesis about what generates the hallucinations for no reason whatsoever and decides they should go on a hiking trip to find Edward’s secret sex meadow from the first book. Why would you do that? Bella was just all excited that she’d definitively cracked the hallucination code (adrenaline and danger), and now we’re suddenly forgetting about that, going after the déjà-vu that didn’t work before? It feels really mechanical; you can hear the plot gears grinding. So what if Bella’s motivations don’t make any sense? We’ve got to get her to the meadow at some point for some reason!

It’s possible to read this as Bella deceiving herself on purpose, elaborately justifying this change in plans based on outdated assumptions out of desperation, but that’s tenuous. I feel like these last few chapters have been the worst so far. The only interesting thing about this stupid, character-consistency-sacrificing section is the fact that this three-paragraph piece of exposition comes in the middle of a scene of dialogue, and it ends when Jacob says “What are you thinking so hard about?” He snaps Bella out of it, and snaps us out of it too. It’s an interesting way to let dialogue intrude on monologue. Normally we think of exposition as outside of the unity of space and time in a novel; when a character is filling us in on backstory we don’t conceive of it as happening in real time, but here it does.

I had fun taking a few sentences in this chapter out of context; as Bella and Jacob prepare for their hiking trip they seem to be speaking entirely in unconscious double-entendres.

• As always, Jacob was game for anything I wanted. No matter how strange it was.
• “I would have figured you for a trail kind of girl.”
• I didn’t playfully shake it off, as I might have otherwise.
• It really looked like he knew what he was doing.
• I’d been waiting for him to bring it up again, but it didn’t look like that was going to happen.

There is also lots to complain about. Jacob agrees to look for the meadow with Bella like this:

“We could use a compass and a grid pattern,” Jacob said with confident helpfulness.

Confident helpfulness? That is a very specific inflection! What does that sound like, exactly?

As Bella and Jacob prepare for the trip, Billy jokes with them about encountering the rumored giant bear, saying “Maybe you should bring a jar of honey, just in case.” Jacob says he hopes Bella’s new hiking boots are fast, and she replies “I only have to be faster than you.” Can we fit a few more bear clichés into this conversation, please?

On their first day out they fail at finding the meadow but succeed at being assholes. Bella remarks that the forest doesn’t seem as dark “with my personal sun along.” It made me realize that if I were in a poetry workshop with Bella I would fucking hate her guts.

Bella asks about Embry at the whole Sam situation and Jacob tells her it’s basically the same as before. He gets all moody, but puts his arm around Bella’s shoulder. She feels too bad to push him away. Jacob is a creep, exploiting his own sadness to get some like this. He doesn’t do much to improve his standing in my eyes, telling Bella that bears don’t like the taste of people anyway: “Of course, you might be an exception. I bet you’d taste good.” Hey, where have we heard a sentiment like that before? Also, shut up Jacob!