I am not a big Star Wars fan. Sure, I’ve seen the numbered movies, many of
them more than once, and I enjoy over half of them, but it was never really the
science fiction franchise that I decided to take the plunge into, that was Doctor
Who. Star Wars, in terms of
the three big half-century spanning science fiction franchises, is the least
fitting in the science fiction genre, being more of a science fantasy story
wearing its influences on its sleeves (especially once you’ve read Dune),
and that isn’t a bad thing. It just
means that I haven’t really had any interest in jumping into the many shows,
spin-off films, comics, or novels connected to the universe despite knowing
they weave an often acclaimed (often derided) tapestry of storytelling. But then a friend of mine proposed a book
exchange and recommended Charles Soule’s Light of the Jedi as the first
book, so I read it and found myself having quite a few thoughts. Mainly because Light of the Jedi feels
very emblematic of the issues with modern franchises in general instead of
attempting to stand on its own as a complete story. This is not a complete story, it is a
prologue for the range of High Republic stories from the Star Wars universe,
and as such this is a book that feels written almost by committee in a way to introduce
as many plot threads and characters as possible instead of focusing in on a
single plot for the book. This approach
to writing the first installment in a multimedia series is not impossible to
pull off well, and there are moments where Soule almost manages to make it work,
but as an outsider Light of the Jedi suffers from being overstuffed with
plotlines that either don’t come to a conclusion by the end of the book or just
feel as if they are dropped for other writers to explore but not in a way that
makes me wish to seek out those stories.
Soule’s writing style is also perhaps partially at
fault for this, it is incredibly quick and snappy which works fairly well when
the larger plotlines are occurring, but whenever there is a cut away to a
different plotline the development is clearly lacking. Soule feels as if he is more comfortable in
writing comics and not novels, for instance the first third of the novel is this
countdown to the point between where the starship Legacy Run is
destroyed and impacts a planet. Soule is
clearly going for a sense of tension with the countdown, but since each chapter
jumps to a different group of people the countdown is really only known to the
reader due to epigraphs under the chapter titles denoting how long until the
impact is going to be felt. So many
characters are introduced that it becomes difficult to really get a grasp on
the situation properly. There are a
handful of characters who become important in the back half that mean Light
of the Jedi can live up to some of its potential, especially when Soule is
exploring the idea central to the High Republic as a functioning republic and
the philosophies of the Jedi Order through Avar Kriss and Jedi/Padawan duo
Loden Greatstorm and Bell Zettifar, but outside of these characters and ideas
there just isn’t enough focus to properly sustain a novel.
I do want to end this review by saying that Light
of the Jedi is by no means a bad novel, it’s just incredibly unfocused as a
novel and for my first foray into the expanded universe of Star Wars it
had ups and downs. The worldbuilding is
great and perhaps reformatting it into maybe three or four novellas would have
improved it as a collection separate from the novel format, but in the way that
it is written it is just kind of a meh read.
5/10.
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