Eclipse is the longest, and possibly the most difficult to read of all of the Twilight series, being a 628 page analysis of Bella's torturous advance to her wedding day " but then that might just be a boy speaking.
In the opening book of Stephanie Meyer's quartet, Twilight, Bella Swan met and fell in love with Edward Cullen, a perpetually teenage vampire. In the second volume, New Moon, a bizarre love triangle developed between a seemingly uncaring Edward, a distraught Bella and an envious Jacob Black, who turned out to be a werewolf. The third volume, Eclipse, is as full of the dangers of a mortal stepping into the realm of the immortals as the first two " it includes the return of the vengeful vampire Victoria, the rise of a murderous army of newborn blood-suckers, and the rising tension between a local pack of werewolves and the Cullen coven. However, like those that came before, Bella's romantic troubles overshadow even the darkest parts of the plot.
Meyer's books have always been sensitive to the idea of eternal life and as such should provide fertile ground for conversations about what it might be like and how one might guarantee their place in it. The vampires are far from the demonic figures of legend and are, at times, even presented as simply another part of God's creation. In that respect their preying on human blood is seen as no different morally to humans eating sheep. There is in fact a continuing strong parallel drawn between these super-humans and other predators of the forest that surrounds Bella's home town. However their immortality is confined to eternal, ageless life on this planet.
Bella's attraction to this kind of eternity " unending time with her beloved " has proved undeniably appealing to teenage girls around the world, as Meyer's book sales demonstrate. However, surrounded by all sorts of underworld threats, Bella's chief fears in Eclipse appear to be aging and marriage. The prospect that her friends will go on, eternally young, while she approaches the terrifying age of " 30! " are enough to send her into apoplexy:
"Am I the only one who has to get old? I get older every stinking day! " Damn it! What kind of world is this? Where is the justice?"
What reads as a tantrum is in effect a raging against the idea that age and eventually death will come to separate her from every good thing that she has come to know " a theme Christians might well pick up on. However her objections to marriage seem to be more based on the insights of a generation that has grown up observing the consequences of fractured vows. It is a prospect that daunts Bella even more than being turned into a blood-seeking vampire:
"Edward had promised that he would change me himself whenever I wanted" just as long as I was married to him first. Sometimes I wondered if he was only pretending that he couldn't read my mind. How else had he struck upon the one condition that I would have trouble accepting? The one condition that would slow me down."
Marriage is by no means the norm in Meyer's vampire world " Edward's desire to marry is considered to be a "traditional' hang over from when he was human. Instead the vampires favour "mates', eternal partners whose dedication to each other somehow transcends this frail human institution. It is their fierce devotion that matters the more than any particular ceremony. This is simply another reflection of a much grander theme that enthuses all of Meyer's writing: the supremacy of love.
Love is the ultimate motivation and excuse; it is the prime driver of the Twilight series. Love leads Bella to deceive her family for the sake of their protection. Love for Edward allows her to disobey the spirit of her father's commands to stay away from him. Sex is the ultimate extension of Bella's devotion to her vampire boyfriend, and his condition that they be married first appears almost quaint, merely part of his earnest, gentlemanly character. But if they went too far one night, one gets the sense that love would even have excused that. It is the love of characters like Heathcliff and Catherine from Wuthering Heights that makes them Bella's favourite couple:
"Nothing can keep them apart " not her selfishness, or his evil, or even death, in the end " their love is their only redeeming quality."
If there is one positive in all of this discussion of love, though, it is Meyer's awareness that it can be a very self-serving motivation. In Eclipse Bella comes to realise that she has in fact been behaving selfishly by trying to preserve her "love' for both Edward the vampire and Jacob the werewolf " much to the detriment of the latter. It is a lesson that many teenage girls might do well to learn: the "best friend who happens to be a boy' is a relationship with the shortest half-life of all. Pretending otherwise is cruel.
The best sort of love, Bella ultimately concludes, is that which is prepared to sacrifice its own happiness for the potential happiness of its beloved. She will make herself miserable (by ending her relationship with Jacob), if that will in the end give her former best friend any opportunity of lasting peace. Now if that doesn't open a door to the presentation of Jesus' own willing sacrifice, I don't know what would"
