Star Wars: Darth Plagueis by: James Luceno

 

“Did you ever hear the tragedy of Darth Plagueis the Wise?  I thought not.  It’s not a story the Jedi would tell you.  It’s a Sith legend.”  These are the opening lines from a monologue given in the film Revenge of the Sith to break Anakin Skywalker with the hope that he can save the woman he is unhealthily obsessed with.  It is what Palpatine needs to make a man fall to the Dark Side with a false hope sealing his doom.  It is a lie.

 

Darth Plagueis by James Luceno proposes that Plagueis was the Sith who took Palpatine as apprentice, passing on his mission for immortality when, as is the cycle of the Sith, he is killed by his apprentice.  The tragedy of Darth Plagueis the Wise is not a lie.  It is what manipulated Palpatine to become the charming but manipulative senator seen in The Phantom Menace.  Darth Plagueis is a demystification of a scene that hinges on that exact mystery being ambiguous to work.  Providing answers to questions that don’t need answering and yet for two thirds of the book Luceno makes those answers at worst satisfying and at best an engrossing character study.  The cycle of apprentices killing masters is integral to Luceno’s ultimate point.  The first six Star Wars films were always going to end the way that they end, Darth Vader is doomed by the narrative to be an apprentice killing his master and the cycle is broken through acts of mercy.  That is perhaps why the first third of Darth Plagueis is devoid of mercy, Plagueis’ master Tenebrous laughs in the face of his own death at Plagueis’ hands.  He dies with pride as the cycle continues.  Luceno characterizes him as broad and comic, villains from their own perspective are often portrayed that way.  Clive Revill and Ian McDiarmid as Palpatine in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi respectively have their own understated camp in their performance of cackling villainy.  Tenebrous’ camp villainy is an overstated death, Plagueis’ is a sinister observation of how it is to die and then pick up the pieces as a respectable capitalist.

 

Palpatine, given no first name in the previous canon, becoming Sidious under Plagueis’ tutorship is a man fully sold by the same temptation to which he will give to Anakin Skywalker.  While Luceno puts truth into the lie of Plagueis the Wise, Plagueis does still die by the end in a manner to parallel Sidious’ own end.  Plagueis and Sidious have had their fun in the end: convincing several others that they are the true apprentices of Plagueis and Sidious only in sequences that make the rule of two utterly ridiculous.  There is a jovial quality to the middle of Darth Plagueis, the sequences which stand as the strongest in the novel.  Luceno is an author whose strengths lie in these types of dissections of villains, his later novel Tarkin being equally interesting because of how it gets into the head of a villain.  Darth Plagueis is a novel, however, that loses sight of the cycle by the end.  In demystifying the lie of Darth Plagueis the Wise, James Luceno devotes far too much of the novel to being a prologue to The Phantom Menace and the prequel trilogy as a whole.  There are sequences of podracing because people enjoyed the podracing sequence of The Phantom Menace and by the final act of the novel the events of the film are happening.  Luceno keeps the focus on Palpatine, however, outside of killing his master Palpatine’s narrative is asking the audience to conjure the key moments of the film.  This does not add context to The Phantom Menace, it simply summarizes the plot from the perspective of a different character.  It leads to approximately 100 pages of the novel to be unnecessary.  Luceno spends two thirds of the novel side stepping the problem but as it creeps in slowly and weakens the whole greatly.

 

Darth Plagueis is a novel built upon proposing the truth to a lie.  James Luceno sells the lie as truth quite well almost entirely through the cyclic framework.  He knows how to get the audience entertained by a villain without making the villain sympathetic.  For Plagueis and Palpatine they would always have ended up villains, their respective masters just accelerated the process, reflected with Anakin’s fall being through manipulation.  It is just the obsessive devotion to rehashing elements of canon that weakens the novel in the end as the epilogue’s direct quoting of The Phantom Menace for closure, accidentally ripping the closure that came several pages earlier.  Darth Plagueis is a novel whose single misstep nearly unravels all of the work Luceno had done and leaves the book struggling with its identity.  6/10.