Revenge of the Sith Novelization Not Just Harrowing, but Beautiful

It's been over a year since "Sith" hit the fan and a millions of fans cried out in fervor and were suddenly sold movie tickets. Away from the hype and hoopla, we are able to look at Matthew Woodring Stover's novelization in and of itself, not as a merchandising tie-in but as an adaptation of screenplay to text.

The previous "Star Wars" novelizations had been, perhaps deliberately, all over the map in terms of style and tone. "A New Hope" (Alan Dean Foster ghostwriting for George Lucas) created a weird and wonderful fantasy world that, while not quite in keeping with the feel of what ended up on screen, has charms of its own. "The Empire Strikes Back" (Donald F. Glut) and "The Phantom Menace" (Terry Brooks) were fairly standardly put-together genre books, as was "Attack of the Clones" (R.A. Salvatore) except less solidly written, seeming reluctant to do anything but rigidly translate script to prose. "Return of the Jedi" (James Kahn) came with an over-the-top flavor of sensation and atmosphere to the point of gleeful decadence.

Stover takes his cues from Kahn, and it works.

Wolfe's review tells us that "[w]hile the motion picture may be able to more accurately depict battle droids and light saber fights, it cannot show the inner fears that dominate Anakin's thoughts." What he leaves out is that indeed everyone's inner thoughts are touched on at one point or another, and not in passing. Stover sets aside entire sections just to put you in a character's head. "This is what it feels like to be Anakin Skywalker / Mace Windu / Obi-Wan Kenobi / clonetrooper #27 / whatever," he'll begin, and shift into the second person to tell us all about it. The device grows irritating after a while, but pays off once we enter Darth Vader's first realization of what he's gotten himself into. "Even after he gives into his anger and fear," Wolfe tells us, "the thoughts of his previous self seep in and cloud his mind and thoughts." It is here that Stover's second-person device comes across quite brilliantly.

Stover understands that "Star Wars" is more about mythological underpinnings than laser beams, and that the latter doesn't come across very well in books to begin with, and keeps us with the characters and the ideas and the abstractions. He personifies Anakin's fear as a dragon, links the love of his life to a dying star. The rather regrettable cover art depicts Vader triumphant and dominating in some sort of kick-butt action movie stance. Ignore it. Instead, take your cue from the color scheme, a weird, offputting, almost clashing path of sick yellows and rusty oranges. This is a novel that will bother you on some level. That's a good thing. The beauty is not delicate but tragic.

"Anakin's every move is shadowed and motivated by his fears," Wolfe writes, and he's correct; the novelization centers around Anakin and manages to always bring you back to him in a logical manner, perhaps even better than the film was able to convey; if you're not with him, you're thinking of him.

When Stover was announced as the writer for the "Episode III" novel, the fan base rejoiced; his blog, which featured a question-and-answer area, was a popular hot spot to get into his head and see what writing the novel was like. The fans' glee at Stover's selection was apt; a true fan of "Star Wars", he delivers a novel of psychological grounding and high grandeur. Though lacking the high-style relish of Kahn's "Jedi" or the bygone-fantasy flair of Foster's "A New Hope", Stover gets us into the characters' heads and creates a storybook world right on the edge of ending unhappily ever after. It is, like Leia's dear departed mother, beautiful... but sad.