BLOGGING BREAKING DAWN, pt. 19: Pine Barrens

I hope people are still reading this blog and that you haven't given up on me just because S. Meyer is being so fucking boring. I'm trying to keep it readable, but it might only be in comparison to the original text. The good news is we learn in this chapter that Bella is likely to give birth sometime in the next four days. So page-wise that means soon, probably! I mean, sure, there have been days that last two hundred pages in this series before, but that means that in the absolute worst-case scenario, we only have 800 more pages of mind-numbingly bland bullshit before Bella is dilated enough to go! Stay with me, here! How many centimeters dilated will she need to be, by the way, do you think? Thirty? Forty?


Chapter 15: Tick Tock Tick Tock Tick Tock

Again, very little happens in this chapter, despite the tension-suggesting title. I'll break down the (relatively) important stuff.

FACT ONE: S. Meyer continues to tentatively push a Leah/Jacob thing for reasons passing understanding. As Jacob runs the perimeter with Seth, his thoughts drift to the lady wolf and his surprise that her only problem seems to be the vampires themselves. “I'd have thought her biggest issue would just be me,” he says. He wonders if she's happy that he understands her pain and hostility now (life in the new wolfpack is like auditing a women's studies class) or if there's something else. If S. Meyer is setting us up for a new love interest, she's doing a terrible job of it; Leah might be developing a crush on Jacob, but he seems to feel next-to-nothing for her. Though, really, Jacob seems to feel next-to-nothing about ANYTHING-- even his heartbreak over Bella felt more profound when we were not privy to his thoughts. Jacob's lack of feeling is a big reason why these chapters are so awful now: Nothing is happening, sure, but nothing was EVER happening; Bella was just better (or worse, depending on your point of view) at putting a dramatic spin on that nothingness. Jacob has every reason to do some big-time brooding, but we don't feel it like we did with Bella (You don't know what you got till it's gone, eh?). We just hear about his pain occasionally (we hear less about emotions these days than we hear about mundane wolfpack details: the shape of the perimeters they are running, what kind of animal Leah ate for breakfast. Jacob is such a cold, analytical, left-brained male stereotype that I feel offended on behalf of my gender. You are allowed to feel, Jacob! You don't have to be the strong, silent type! Talk to us!) enough that we might as well be outside of his head where we used to be.

(Or that is how it feels, anyway; what's really happening is S. Meyer is lost in the wilderness, and Jacob is the face of our author's mid-book crisis.)

FACT TWO: S. Meyer continues to fill in her plot holes retroactively. Jacob suddenly realizes that the Cullens could have just left town and wonders why they haven't. Seth tells him that he's raised the issue before, and that Carlisle wants to stay because of his easy access to medical supplies and also because Edward doesn't really want to move Bella in her fragile state. Plus, during a later conversation with Carlisle we learn that Jasper and Emmett are off researching ancient legends about babies resembling Bella's. So I guess S. Meyer agreed with me that her “muttering upstairs” explanation from last time didn't pass muster and came up with a new story. So was Alice up there murmuring by herself?

"Fuck this fucking book, what am I even doing around here anymore? This is bullshit. I'm better than this. We're all better than this. God damn."-Alice Cullen

FACT THREE: Alice, luckily, is sticking around. Jacob returns to the Cullen house partly because Alice has been asking for him, complaining about being the “vampire bat in the belfry.” (Jacob is not sufficiently happy when Seth tells him “Alice wants you,” by the way. Be grateful, Jacob!) When he shows up she comes down the stairs, acting like Jacob is "late for an appointment" with her. Did Jacob maybe agree to something untoward when he was half asleep? I mean, I wouldn't like to think that Alice would take advantage of him when he was barely conscious, but she totally would, especially if Jasper isn't around.

FACT FOUR: The second half of this chapter is incomprehensibly blocked, as is always the case when spatial relationships are important. Jacob sits next to Bella on the couch with his arm around her to keep her warm. Edward is nearby, but it's never really clear where he is. Alice is sitting on the floor behind the back of the couch, so that no one can even see her. Her disembodied voice occasionally chimes into the conversation, which actually a great touch. She's very Luna Lovegood here. One particularly funny thing Alice does from behind the couch is bitchily suggest Rosalie get Jacob some food. (“Rosalie stared at the place Alice's voice had come from in disbelief.”) Rose grudgingly does so but bends a metal mixing bowl into a dog dish and serves him with that. Later, when Rosalie makes a callous remark about the likelihood of Bella's survival, Jacob and Edward briefly conspire telepathically and then Jacob throws his food dish at the back of her head so hard that it flattens when it hits her and then ricochets across the room. He apparently does this with one arm around Bella and without waking her from a nap. Wow. It's also unclear where Rosalie is sitting that she has her back to everyone, or why she even would, given that Bella is surrounded by Jacob, Edward and Alice AKA Team Abortion. But she's only upset because he got food in her hair and then everyone has a big laugh. Including Alice, who technically wouldn't have even seen what happened unless there's a well-placed mirror in the mix.

FACT FIVE: Charlie is back in the mix, sort of. Jacob flips when Seth tells him, early on, that Bella's been talking on the phone to Charlie. He rather rightly assumes Bella will never see her father again and will have to, sooner or later, fake her own death. Stringing Charlie along now is just cruel, and Jacob has some experience with being cruelly strung along by Bella. So he raises the issue with Edward who tells him Bella has a rather pie-in-the-sky plan: if she lives, in a year or two she'll see Charlie again. She knows that she will look different, and she hopes that Charlie will make some kind of assumption about what the Cullens are and will get it wrong, thus circumventing the the Volturi. I'm not sure why thinking the Cullens were some OTHER kind of paranormal creature isn't just as bad; Volturi law isn't a highly specific set of statutes, which is a policy problem I have raised before. But it's not like they would send over their SS guys or whatever and the Cullens can just go “No, he thinks we're unicorns, not vampires, it's cool” and be fine. Though it does lead to the biggest meta-wink yet, when Edward tells Jacob he and his family “hardly adhere to vampire canon.” Indeed. But it is implied that Edward is letting Bella have her pipe dream because he doesn't think she'll survive anyway. Dark! But of course, Bella's idealistic plan is probably EXACTLY what will happen. Twilight is kind of like Voltaire's Candide, where everything miraculously works out despite the numerous deadly mix ups in which our characters get involved. Except in Candide that's part of the joke.

FACT SIX: Jacob finds out from Edward and Carlisle that based on Bella's accelerated pregnancy, the baby should be due in four days. Bella compares her fast-growing fetus to Jacob, and Carlisle points out that Alice can't “see” either of them. If it turns out that humans and vampires have werewolf babies, I don't know if I will be able to go on. My brain might break. (On another superdumb note, Jacob wonders why he feels so drawn to Bella still and remarks that the size of her body is increasing her gravitational pull. Oy gevalt.) Carlisle wonders if that is a hint as to the chromosomal count the baby will have, and he and Edward and Alice start talking biology too complex for Jacob to follow. So they use the word "biology," I guess. ("Whoa, speak English please, Mr. Scientism."-Jacob Black) It's lucky that S. Meyer has a narrator too dumb to care about science-- that way she doesn't have to do any more research than flipping through an 8th-grade biology text book once or twice. That disregard for any real scientific realism doesn't usually bother me much-- it's a fantasy after all-- except for the weird insistence on the importance of chromosomal count. Why the hell would that even matter?

Speaking of research, Jacob also hears that, based on what Emmett and Jasper have been able to find, the fetus will likely use its teeth to escape Bella's body. I don't trust Emmett's ability to do research any more than I trust S. Meyer's, but Jacob has a terrifying feeling that if the baby has to bite its way out, a similar method will have to be employed if they want to control the birth in some fashion. He dreads what might come next. Welcome to the club, Jake. Our narrator makes this discovery by irritatingly listing “fact one” and “fact two” and so on. (“Fact four, not many things could cut through something as strong as vampire skin.”) All facts, no feelings. Again: such a typical guy!