Review: Tarkin

Tarkin by James Luceno
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This probably rates 3.5 stars for me - I liked it and think it's much better than almost every other Star Wars book out right now (with the exception of Dark Disciple), and there was nothing hugely wrong with it, but I just wasn't thrilled. The first half of the book gives us Tarkin's surprising (but very severe) backstory via a sort of flashback formula, while the second lets us see Tarkin in action and working with Darth Vader.

Tarkin's backstory is almost laughable, and I don't necessarily believe that it would realistically result in the Tarkin we know and love to hate. It's certainly dramatic, though - his family, from a half-wild planet that they were forced to tame over generations, sends a prepubescent Tarkin with distant relatives into the wild jungle for three months out of the year, where he must catch and kill his own food and fend for himself. The point is to show his mastery of inferior beings by showing his superiority and forcing order upon the wild. To me, it's a little contrived, but hey - they took a risk, and it didn't entirely fail. We return to this story throughout the novel, but it doesn't get any more rewarding - just reiterated. We also get a brief history of Tarkin's career up until the time of the novel.

The actual story has us meet Tarkin shortly after he is put in charge of building the Death Star. A base under his command is attacked, and he realizes there are some sort of insurgent forces at work using 1) stolen or smuggled Imperial ships/materials and 2) really advanced communications-hacking tech (the latter of which he is familiar with, and gives us plenty of callbacks to the Clone Wars series, as in every new SW novel). He and Vader are tasked to find the villains, who eventually steal Tarkin's ship. Spoiler alert: in the end, Tarkin figures everything out and the Imperials win. There are some half-hearted attempts at characters, especially in the insurgent forces, but given that everyone has a tendency to monologue about Tarkin's history as if they know it as well as he does and also monologue about generic Empire Is Bad But Maybe Everyone Is Bad things, I didn't really feel much of anything for anyone. The plot is neither compelling nor surprising, just like the characters. All in all, pretty okay book that at least kept me vaguely interested.

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