If the “Fate of the Jedi” series wasn’t your cup of tea up to this point, it still isn’t; much of the plotting involves political scheming and transfers of power. I don’t totally blame “Star Wars” fans for not being engaged by that aspect of the saga, but the unfortunate thing is that they’re also missing out on a great character arc, which Christie Golden takes to new heights in the eighth, penultimate and best book of the saga, “Ascension” (August, hardcover).
This one took me awhile to get through because there’s a lot going on, and there are a lot of audacious changes, a few of which genuinely surprised me. The emotional centerpiece continues to be Vestara, a teenage girl who grew up in Sith culture, who is falling in love with Ben Skywalker and who now wants to be trained as a Jedi. So much of the light side/dark side mumbo jumbo in “Star Wars” novels (see Jacen Solo’s transformation into Darth Caedus in “Legacy of the Force”) doesn’t ring true; it just seems like the writers need a new villain. But Golden sells Vestara’s arc convincingly, through the letters she writes to a loving father that doesn’t actually exist, along with how Luke and Ben see her and sense her in the Force. Before long, I was totally convinced she is willing to take the path to the light side (like a knight on his council, if Luke Skywalker is convinced, I’m convinced). But there’s a great twist in the final pages that presents Vestara’s path in a whole new light.
Up to this point, I hadn’t totally bought into Abeloth as the Big Bad. The shape-changing Dark Side-user is just so cartoonishly powerful. As if to address this, for a lot of “Ascension” Golden abandons the Abeloth arc and follows manipulative Imperial Moffs who are plotting their rise to become rulers of the galaxy. There’s a lot of backstabbing and a couple of truly harrowing sequences of torture and violence that will having you hating some of these guys. In the end, Golden can’t exactly drop Abeloth from the narrative, but she does find a clever back door to re-introduce the character; I admit I was caught off guard by a neat twist.
A shift that will likely have implications heading into the next multi-book saga after this one — which will wrap with Troy Denning’s “Apocalypse” on April 3 — is that Luke decides the Jedi shouldn’t be based on Coruscant anymore. He pulls everyone out, and just in time too, as some of the power-hungry beings in and outside the Senate probably wouldn’t say no to another Order 66.
A major complaint about recent “Star Wars” books is that they are so politically centered. Sure, we know plenty of Jedi by name and personality, and some of them even get arcs from time to time, but mostly they are just standing around the Jedi Temple talking about politics. With the Jedi’s base of operations moving to another planet (we don’t know where yet), it could be the spark the writers need to move away from the political side of the Jedi Council and toward the character side. That’s something we got in the “Young Jedi Knights” series and are currently getting on TV’s “The Clone Wars” (although there’s a fair amount of politics there, too).
It’s nice to see Jaina in the thick of things in “Ascension,” joining Luke, Ben and Vestara on their travels. But when one character gets more page time, another inevitably gets less, and the victim here is Tahiri, a character a really want to like who is always underused. Still, she does experience another major change in her life — after escaping from prison in the last book, she has now become an apprentice of sorts to Jag Fel on a probationary basis. That could lead in interesting directions.
The real achievement in “Ascension,” though, is Vestara, one of the best Expanded Universe characters in a good long while. She’ll be the best reason to check out the final book in the series, too.