Yes, it’s been quite a while since ‘Midnight Sun’ landed and rescued us all from the horrors of 2020 by mentally transporting us back to the blissful time of 2005/6. However, 768 pages is quite a lot of angst to get through, especially when one has a very demanding full time job. Sadly, ‘new book which I’m excited about leave‘, isn’t a thing; and a 768 page hardback is quite difficult to sneak under the table to read on the sly in meetings…not that I’ve ever done that…for a while. I thought about making ‘Midnight Sun’ the subject of my next review, but honestly by the time I ploughed through to the end, I had largely forgotten any significant points from the beginning or middle. Nevertheless, I did still enjoy it on the whole, and it prompted some after-thoughts which my husband and dog had no interest in listening to, but I felt the need to share somewhere – so naturally I reasoned that strangers on the internet would make the perfect listening (or reading) ears.
The experience of reading ‘Midnight Sun’ was the closest sensation I’ve had to being able to re-read a familiar book with fresh eyes, and without having to first experience some level of memory loss. I never re-read books; my late mum always said one of her biggest fears about dying was the possibility of leaving this planet without having read literally all of the books ever, and that really stuck with me. It has never made sense to me to get hung up on re-visiting the same stories when there are always so many new and exciting ones to discover, though the sad thing about reading a great book is that, even if you re-read it, you’ll never experience that same level of excitement and anticipation of unexpected plot twists and character development in the same way again. But re-telling the same story from another character’s perspective? This, I can get on board with. Despite my personal objections to Edward Cullen as an entity in himself, ‘Midnight Sun’ was the closest I’ll ever get to re-reading ‘Twilight’ for the first time, which was a special and important rite of passage for pretty much every female born in the early 90’s.
I was always very firmly ‘Team Jacob’ (and still passionately am, especially when I’m a few glasses of wine deep and watching ‘New Moon’ on Netflix); so of course I opened ‘Midnight Sun’ with a scowl and emitted very deliberate tuts at regular intervals throughout its reading, much to the irritation of my husband. But they do say to keep your enemies closer, and it has to be said that Stephanie Meyer definitely made full use of this opportunity to explain and somewhat defend Edward Cullen’s massive personal flaws. Some books will always remain classics despite some quite troubling themes, and although I seriously doubt that a generation of former mid-Noughties emo girls could ever generate sufficient hype to give the ‘Twilight’ saga anything approaching the same level of status as the universally classic, and yet equally problematic, ‘Wuthering Heights’; it was refreshing, and definitely relieving, to have the more problematic aspects of ‘Twilight’ re-visited and explained in a new light. In summary, we finally found out why Edward appears to be such a controlling d*ck throughout.
So, having seen Stephanie Meyer achieve the impossible and finally get me kind of on the side of Edward Cullen after all these years, I started to wonder (like Carrie Bradshaw), why stop there? I have no doubt that this has been a thing for a long time, and there must be a multitude of fantastic books already in circulation which have equally gripping spin-offs from the perspective of other characters, but how great would it be if this was a thing for every book we enjoyed? A quick google of this phenomenon on my post-Midnight Sun buzz uncovered some absolute dynamite book ideas which clearly other people were much quicker off the mark about writing than me. I mean, Jane Eyre from Mr Rochester’s perspective? You’re keeping your secret wife in the attic, bro, there must be another story worth telling there. Watch this space for my thoughts on that one…
Clyde's Corner 