‘Star Wars’ flashback: ‘Tatooine Ghost’ (2003) (Book review)

With “Episode VII: The Force Awakens” appearing to return to the GFFA’s home planet later this year, it’s a good time to look back at “Tatooine Ghost” (2003), which is set entirely on the sand planet. It took me awhile to commit to it, though. I’d reach for it on the shelf, then hesitate. While Troy Denning serves up some outstanding links between the classic and prequel trilogies in “Tatooine Ghost,” he also delivers long slogs (literally, for the characters) through the desert. I found the desert treks more bearable on this reading, though.

The oddest thing about “Tatooine Ghost” is that Luke is not in the novel, except for one short HoloNet conversation. At first blush, it feels like it should be Luke, not Leia, learning all about Anakin Skywalker’s past on Tatooine, because he grew up on a moisture farm there. But on second thought, Anakin is just as much Leia’s father as he is Luke’s.

Luke is further along than Leia in his family studies at this point, but it all happened off-page. In the HoloNet chat with his sister, Luke says he knew about Anakin winning the Boonta Eve Podrace, as he had looked it up on the Net. He had already come to accept the idea that Anakin gradually turned to evil rather than being born that way, whereas Leia – who had declined to forgive her ghostly father in “The Truce at Bakura” — has taken the naïve stance that he “came out of the womb wearing a breather and black helmet.”

While Leia will presumably share Shmi Skywalker’s video diary with Luke after this book, we never see Luke’s reaction to that window into his grandmother’s life. Luke looks up Anakin again in the Coruscant databanks in the Thrawn trilogy and he meets with a Force-user who claims to know Luke’s mom in the “Black Fleet Crisis” trilogy. That turns out to be a hoax, but the Skywalkers and Solos will learn about Padme in Denning’s “Dark Nest” trilogy, making him the master of the “bridge novel.”

With Leia terrified of having dangerous Force-using children in “Tatooine Ghost” (by the end, she changes her mind, setting the stage for the Thrawn trilogy), and with Luke doubting his ability to train new Jedi in the stories between “Return of the Jedi” and the “Jedi Academy Trilogy,” one might think the Skywalker twins would be pouring over their family history during this time period.

Perhaps they will be more proactive in the Disney canon. In Legends, the authors had to work around the knowledge gap of the prequel era until those films came out. Overall, I’d say Legends did a respectable job: Many kids’ interest in their parents’ and grandparents’ lives goes in fits and starts, and both the lack of complete records and the Skywalker twins’ fears about what they’ll find explain their alternating curiosity and hesitance.

I recall Denning’s first “Star Wars” book, “New Jedi Order: Star By Star,” being overwritten, and that’s still an issue in “Tatooine Ghost” with the sequences of Han nearly dying in the desert and Leia and Han’s caravan nearly doing the same when evading Imperial searchers. (The Solos and Imperials are both pursuing Kitster, who possesses Killik Twilight, an Alderaanian painting that contains Rebel military codes.) But Denning seems to be aware of his proclivity this time, as he has Leia watching entries in Shmi’s journal, even during the desert journey.

She learns Shmi’s history as Watto’s slave and Cleig’s wife, from after Anakin’s departure through Shmi’s murder by Tusken Raiders. The whole culture of slavery in Mos Espa is new to Leia. Denning does a nice job hinting that Watto likes Shmi deep down, and misses Anakin. Leia begins to get a shockingly fuller picture of the boy who would be Darth, seeing that Kitster admires Anakin and does not believe the rumors that he became Vader, and also learning that Shmi’s murder might have started Anakin down his dark path. (In addition to Kitster, other prequel tie-ins include Wald and Podracers Ody Mandrell and Teemto Pagalies. Denning even has Teemto recount his experience in the “Podracing Tales” webcomic to Leia – a nice continuity touch.)

Anakin is a folk hero on Tatooine, as everyone knows him as the 9-year-old human who won the Boonta Eve Podrace. While there are rumors that he became Darth Vader, they aren’t talked about much. On Earth, we see similar disconnections between accepted history and localized beliefs about people, so it makes sense that this phenomenon would occur on Tatooine, which — relative to other planets — was mostly ignored by the Empire.

Because “Episode VII” is part of a new continuity, its connection to “Tatooine Ghost” might go beyond the Tatooine setting. It’s possible that Luke and Leia could uncover a bunch of information about their past – and the Force – in the movie. They could get this information via a video journal or even from elderly versions of “Episode I” youths such as Kitster.