Reviews Books JC Lit Reviews Special: BATTLEFRONT: TWILIGHT COMPANY (spoilers)

An easy 9/10. Top three book of the new canon, and probably top five of all time Star Wars novels. Terrific action can kinda be expected from a tie-in to a video game, but it's the emphasis on the characterization and humanization of the soldiers we follow where the book really shines. An unexpectedly excellent book.

 

There was a part of me that didn't want to rate this book highly, because I'm not entirely certain I like what the universally positive reaction to it says about Star Wars fandom. But that's kind of silly in retrospect. 10/10, an absolutely phenomenal work - I don't want to say it's the best of the new canon because that's an apples-to-oranges sort of thing, but it's certainly much, much better than a videogame tie-in had any right to bet.

 

48 / 50 = average score of 9.6 / 10

...what? I was curious, and someone has to be the Hav here.

 

9/10, here's why:

http://www.nydailynews.com/entertai...wilight-company-book-review-article-1.2421604

 

Overall I absolutely love this this book 10/10. Great Characters and amazing immersion. I'll go into greater detail here, but be warned, there are a lot of spoilers ahead, if you even have a slight urge to read this book , do so first, you won't regret it.

Spoiler

Alright, one of the first things I noticed that was quite special about this book was during the Coyerti campaign, our heroes are tasked with the destruction of an AT-ST scout walker. When given the details we find that they took an entire day of careful maneuvering to sink the walker in the swamp. I'm tempted to say this is standard fare, (this works towards my point in fact), but the way the information is presented, in an insignificant way, makes it all the more significant. We are given this information throughout a short paragraph. I can't help but feel that in any other story this event in and of itself would be a big deal, an undertaking devoting an entire chapter to planning and allotting more for execution. The briefness of the information makes such feats seem routine for our heroes. I'll touch more on this subject later, so I'll keep this brief .

I also think Freed did a very good job describing Namir's injury and just the general feeling of despair throughout the Hoth portion of the novel. I love the effect that not being treated as a priority by the empire has on Chalis. And while we're talking about Hoth, am I right to assume that man with the corellian alcohol fixing his ship was Han? Because if it was I love the use of his character and the subtlety of the whole thing.

I also really liked the subtle transformation of Namir's character as he seemed to grow more fond of the Rebel cause, this really came to a head for me when Chalis scoffed at his ideas about her motives and told him that "I would have expected that question from a rebel. From you, I expected more" and perhaps I'm reading into that a but to much but I thought it did a great job.

Finally I found Roach's death to quite well executed, I'd expect this to be a pivotal event in the battle for Sullust, but its just another short paragraph. This what I think is the best part of this book. It doesn't seek to glorify the battle, its blunt and harsh and everything horrors of war should be. Characters aren't all killed off in stunning blazes of glory, taking down a legion of troops to secure victory, they get chopped in half before they even get a chance and gunned down in the halls of an enemy ship. The events Twilight Company goes through say so much about their character. The fact that they persevere through such tough situations and make them routine shows that while Jedi may have an edge, what with their magic and such, but they can never match Twilight's toughness and heart.

If I had to say one bad thing about this book, its the spine, being branded as a Battlefront novel completely messes with the looks. Its one of the only books on my shelf not to display the whole Star Wars thing top center. And if the only compliant I can muster is a pretentious rant on aesthetics, then I'm can't see a reason for you not to give this book a shot.

 

So, I've been gone a while. Taking a bit of a break from SW until I was in the right headspace to give new canon a fair shot. But I'm catching up now, and this book pushed me into coming back here because I had a really strong reaction to it and nowhere to really talk about it.

Essentially I was simultaneously enormously impressed and disappointed. I think my final score is 8/10. It was a 10/10 book for a very long time, but I felt the way it wrapped up was...unsatisfying in some ways. Or, at least, I didn't feel like the book gave me enough space to reassure me I wasn't reading against the text. It's an incredible story that swerves at a crucial moment leaving me unsure why the final, key conflict is resolved in the way it is.

Detailed review/discussion follows, but be warned, here be spoilers.

Spoiler

Let's start with the good stuff. I'm not a fan of military action. The premise of this novel didn't excite me. But, this novel pulled me in and kept me invested. Everi Chalis is a spectacular character. Seriously, she's just fantastic. Her final showdown with Verge and Tabor was chilling. Namir's backstory and existence in a near sub-culture of the Rebellion was not a situation I'd considered before and found really interesting. Even Howl, whom I at first dismissed as somewhat stereotypical (come on, now, you can do better than to steal a nickname from the A-Team!), up and died half way through, shifting the novel into a different configuration, and became a much more interesting character in retrospect. I loved the X-Wing novels, but I always remember the first one pointing out the huge likelihood of death as a fighter pilot and that never, really, being followed through. This novel did, but walked the line between taking people I cared about and taking everyone I cared about. It was evocative. It had a plot that swung around and changed unexpectedly, without losing sight of the fact this was a single mobile infantry unit. Not one full of named heroes, just a company of grunts, going where they were told. Then, without anyone to tell them...

So my issue? I guess, in the simplest terms, I wasn't sold on Namir's change of heart. On his decision to stay on Sullust rather than go on to Kuat. I really, reallywanted to see if they could win on Kuat. It was an idea that excited and intrigued me and...and I guess I found Namir's choice to stay on Sullust short-sighted and kind of stupid.

In catching up on the new canon novels, I've also read Aftermath, Lost Stars and all three of the middle-grade Big Three books. One thing I've noticed is the fact they aren't shying away from Rebels using tactics like suicide bombings and being willing to kill their friends to prevent them from being captured. While I think it is, generally, a pretty poor novel, the Princess Leia book - Moving Target - explicitly deals with the morality of Rebel tactics. Perhaps reading Twilight Company so soon after reading Moving Target affected my opinion in some ways, but here's the thing -

When Namir decided that the worthy fight was on Sullust, of all people it was Gadren who disagreed.

Brand shakes Namir's confidence and points out to him (perhaps correctly) that he has been relying too much on Chalis over all others. But Gadren, the one who talks to Namir about Howl's beliefs, who affirms to him that he can ask Twilight for sacrifice, Gadren is the one who is unsure of Namir's decision. The one who points out that Namir is not capable of making the assessment that he's making - about whether Kuat would mean anything at all.

So I thought: this is going to be amazing. We're going to get the discussion that was ignored and glossed over in Moving Target - the discussion about where moral boundaries lie, about where the ends cease justifying the means, and we're going to get Gadren, as the fascinating advocate for both moral relativism and high ideals.

But instead Chalis pulls a gun on Namir which settles everything.

It's not that I don't think Chalis would ever do that. It's tragic in a way: she didn't realise the trust she had managed to engender in the Company and so couldn't bring herself to rely on it. Her life revolves around trying to prove herself worthy of respect in an atmosphere so toxic she can't see it when it's genuine. The way Namir can't recognise honest non-toxic idealism. Sides of a coin, all that literary good stuff.

But in the context of the novel, it's...convenient. Chalis is conveniently discredited so that Gadren's concerns don't have to be addressed. It's...crappy writing, to be honest. It's disconcerting because everything around it is handled so well.

Because we never get an actual conversation between Namir and Gadren and Chalis, I'm left with my own interpretation of events:

If Chalis hadn't had her showdown on Verge's ship, Twilight would have been obliterated. Sullust would have remained under Imperial control. Namir would have led Twilight to its death for, essentially, no damn reason. Namir's absolutist insistence that - if an action at Kuat won't end the war, then its essentially the equivalent of spitting in the enemy's eye - is an absurdly reductionist position. He insists that the "worthy" fight is on Sullust, but I don't understand why. And it's not for lack of trying. I WANT to get it, and I'm willing to accept "because the ends ceased justifying the means," as a reason. I'm willing to accept moral arithmetic that isn't the same as mine as long as I understand it.

It feels also though he essentially decided to get everyone killed in a last stand that was morally uncomplicated rather than trying to make a difference on the offchance that Chalis' motives weren't pure (or because he wasn't smart enough to asses the results). It didn't feel like Namir had a revelation about Howl's ideology so much as he mistook the method for the goal. He spent so long both believing that he needed to offer Twilight hope in the form of a(n impossible) goal and feeling like he was taking up the role of propagandist warlord from Crucival to do so, that when he shifts away from that it feels like a revelation. He can focus on what they're doing and how theydo it instead of where they're going and what they want to achieve. But it's the same thing. It involves all the same questions of ideology and propaganda and honour and morality.

The idea that acting in accordance with a set of principles yields goals and results may tie into the will of the Force. Maybe Howl even knew that. But Namir doesn't. And I can't help but see this as him retreating to a comfort zone. He's increasingly uncomfortable with the distance opening up between him and his company and once Brand calls him out, he throws everything into reverse, decides to fight the ground war, and does it because he can't visualise the consequences of Kuat. Because, as Chalis said, he's incapable of understanding the scale of the enemy. Knowing that, Namir has two choices: trust someone else who does, or focus on something hecan understand. He does the latter. Under other circumstances (because Namir's not wrong that Chalis' motives are suspect) that might be the smart move. But not when the only forseeable outcome is oblivion and there is another choice.

A choice that Gadren - the person who gave Namir this second-hand advice from Howl he now thinks he's following - may well prefer.

Howl believed in the principle of sacrifice, but sacrifice in service to the Rebellion and its wider goals. He was trying to achieve something. Namir seems to have internalised his methods, but not his purpose.

ALL of this could have been resolved if there'd been a four-page discussion between Chalis and Gadren on ethics and options in combat. If they had had ANY kind of plan to deal with the Imperial ships that had a hope in hell of working. Sullust over Kuat is a fair choice and Namir's compassionate pragmatism against Chalis' ego-driven brilliance could have been superb. Do you save a world or hurt the Imperial war machine? That's a worthy question.

But this book ended up framing it as whether you die pointlessly with a world or hurt the Imperial war machine, but then pretended that it hadn't.

So this book dropped - for me - from a 10/10 to a 7/10 in the final section. But I revise it up to an 8/10 because perhaps I'm right. Perhaps I'm supposed to read this as Namir being a great squad leader but an imperfect captain, who never managed to answer how to handle being devoted to his people, but not, at all, understanding their cause. I think, if that's the case, if we're supposed to see his inability to trust in Chalis and go to Kuat, or his inability to convince Chalis to help him win Sullust, as tragic, and as a result of his limitations as a leader (which I don't necessarily mean in an unsympathetic way), then I think that should have been clearer in the text. I absolutely credit it with the way we continue to see Chalis' perspective, but I still feel that, on balance, the novel wants me to see Namir as finally understanding what he needs to do. And I still feel...like I don't get why.

So. Yeah.

8/10.

But...so much of it's so good. If they could just have...not circumvented a conversation about the core narrative conflict by having a character pull a gun to invalidate everything she might have had to say.

 

Herky-jerky, a bit boring and dry at times, meandering story line.

But a strong finish that pulled it all together well.

7/10

 

Nice to see you.

 

A nitpick: there are at least two real life military commanders I can think of with a "Howling Mad" nickname. The A-Team doesn't have a monopoly on it.

 

Fair enough - I know a lot more about pop culture than military history so I didn't know that. Point still stands?

 

Yeah. It's just a pet peeve.

 

Very legitimate point, actually. I hadn't considered that.

Spoiler

I accept Namir's decision that liberating Sullust is a worthier cause than Kuat. I was certainly disappointed, because I really wanted to watch the Kuat battle unfold, but in the context of Howler's philosophy the decision seemed to make sense.

When exactly does the Star Destroyer appear though? Isn't it after they've made the decision to stay and fight and the battle is underway? If that's the case, the battle only becomes impossible for Twilight after it has started, in which case Namir would think, going in to Sullust, that he's fighting a difficult but potentially winnable fight. And if the Star Destroyer appears out of nowhere and mucks things up, he isn't exactly likely to just say "hell with it" and give up.

I could be wrong though, I don't remember the timeline perfectly. If they knew about the Star Destroyer beforehand, you're right.

 

Yay! I'm glad the issue makes sense! As to your question,

Spoiler

I read it last week and have read other books since then, so embarrassingly that may already be enough to knock my timeline off, but, while I don't think the Star Destroyer was yet in system, they knew it was almost certainly due to arrive. They worked out that they'd walked into a trap - one designed to be sprung as they tried to leave the planet. Because they were trying not to spook the Rebels, they didn't have any large ships in system when Twilight Company arrived - they quickly mobilised what they had available in adjacent systems once they heard they were there. So - not Star Destroyers at that point. But Chalis says the next logical step would be for their enemy (most likely Prelate Verge) to bring in reinforcements and destroy them. She says this will most likely be a Star Destroyer and that it should arrive in a day or two. I suppose Namir could have chosen not to believe her, but it didn't seem that way to me in the novel, and it doesn't seem like a controversial assessment either?

Anyway, like I said, I actually kind of think the story still works, even with this logical error. It just means different things about Namir and why he did what he did. It becomes a story that's balanced slightly more towards loss and slightly less towards resolution. I just wish I knew if I were right about what I see in it... Death of the author, I suppose?

 

I finished it yesterday. I loved it but I will say that I'm generally a fan of this type of story and I've wanted something like this for Star Wars for a long time (story focused on the ground troops). There are things in this book that make me thing of the Black Company (the jumping around with the action/ the deaths/the soldiers) and Gaunt' Ghosts, Malazan (the deaths/the soldiers). The fact that it reminded me of other series I really like is a good thing.

I'm not going to say much about the action but it was good. I never had trouble picturing what happened and we got a ton of diversity, which I loved. This book managed to pack in a lot of stuff - I admit I wanted to spend more time in some places but I liked seeing their campaign. I really hope he writes some more, either about the Company or other units it doesn't matter. An entire book from the POV of the stormtroopers would be cool. Btw I found it interesting that the Empire would put troops through accelerated training just to bulk out Stormtrooper Corps even if it reduces their quality. Quantity is a quality all of it's own - as a certain megalomaniac once said.

Namir was a wonderful protagonist and I appreciated his way of looking at the Rebellion and the conflict. I really like how beccatoria read the pivotal scene towards the end and I think it's supossed to be read that way - but Namir never figures it out sadly (he and Challis were great). I like the fact that we only got the know the other squad members as well as Namir did (when did Roach get so talkative). He kept a certain distance from people (especially in the second half of the book) that reminded me of Wedge in the first X-Wing book. “Soldiers are issued armour for their flesh and bones, but they must fashion their own for their souls. Piece by piece. (Itkovian - Memories of Ice)” Namir is better at keeping his soul armored than Wedge was (not that he isn't bleeding on the inside) but then again he's had more time to practice that - which is probably what contributes to him not figuring out the what/why and how did Howl keep the Company going.


I mentioned the deaths. This book killed characters without mercy, sometimes off screen (I'm not sure if I'm thankful for that or not) and without ceremony. And yet I like that it reminds us of these deaths with the funeral scenes - showing us the gaps they left, the effect they had on those who survive and it never felt gratuitous. “Soldiers live. He dies and not you, and you feel guilty, because you're glad he died, and not you. Soldiers live, and wonder why.” ― Glen Cook, Soldiers Live

The funny thing is that despite all the action scenes, even when Namir went Dwarf Fortress on the Imperials, the scene that sticks in my mind the best is a very minor one. An insanely minor one. The bit when Namir walks into the apartment and sees Roach in full gear but barefoot, dancing like crazy to music so loud Namir could feel the vibrations from the bass in his bones. It's only a page long and yet that scene is the first that pops up when I think of this book. Probably because amid all the horror and insanity of war there is still room for brief periods of normality, of silliness. Time enough to remember you're alive and why you're even doing this.

It's not a perfect book but I'm still giving it 10/10 because I enjoyed it that much.

 

9/10 for me.

I loved the book, but like others found the ending a little rushed. I understand it was important for Namir to stay on Sullust because it was part of his process of figuring out what the Alliance was really about, but it felt abrupt. Also I was really looking forward to that battle at Kuat...
Still highly recommended. I think many of the people who weren't fans of Aftermath will enjoy this book, as it's a much more "traditional" star wars novel.

 

9/10, really great book overall. Loved getting to see the Galactic Civil War through the eyes of these troopers. It definitely helped put the war back into Star Wars. Loved the battle sequences. I especially liked the first half the book jumping around the various battlefields with the Twilight company engaging in these small scale assaults. If the whole book was like that it would have been perfect for me. Once it gets into major assaults and how Kuat came into play It starts to feels too much like Rebels episode for me. Also, I always want to see any Star Wars story utilize a greater variety of starships and ground vehicles, either pulling from Legends or making news ones. Cheap CGI in this instance. The whole book I pictured Prelate Verge at the command of a nice Battlecrusier.

Don't need things to get too dark when it comes to Star Wars, but along the lines of this book I think it would be interesting to see more of the devastation this war brought to the Galaxy. Maybe see some planets devastated or destroyed by the Empire, or some large battles that were hard fought and not won by lucky shots, sabotage, or Imperial incompetence. I think for me, it helps show just what the Rebels/New Republic are fighting and sacrificing their lives for.

 

I loved this book! For sure in my top three books of the new canon, along with Lost Stars and Lords of the Sith. I was a little bit worried going into it because it is a video game tie-in novel, but you could honestly just remove "Battlefront" from the title and treat this like any other original novel in the canon. It was great to see a perspective on way that we don't usually get to see in Star Wars; from the foot soldiers in the infantry. Any action that actually does take place in the sky is still shown to us through the eyes on the infantry on the ground below. We're not reading about Jedi Knights, Sith Lords, or princesses here. We're reading a war novel about soldiers on the ground. It's a unique perspective that I really enjoyed. The only thing I really don't like about the book is that there are no announced sequels. I would love to read more about Twilight Company!

8.5/10

Here's my full review.

 

Of all the adult books in the new canon, this is the best (especially because some of the others I've read were scheduled to be printed before the move to Disney, so they're a mix of Legends and NEU).

Twilight Company is the Rebel Alliance's 61st Mobil Infantry. They first moved into Imperial territory to gain help from more worlds, but began a Mid-Rim retreat in order to save those they've already helped. In all of their missions, they try to recruit more members for the Alliance.
(It has a very Wraith Squadron feel, since most of the action is related to ground battles. Even those in space though are with ships other than X-Wings, which provides a unique feel compared to most other SW novels I've read). It's definitely not as funny as the Allston/Stackpole novels though. I still felt it was very interesting though.

It is very interesting to look at the nitty gritty part of the Rebels - those fighting elsewhere and working towards an Alliance beyond the political spectrum. Twilight has funeral rituals which are sobering and yet beautiful, in a way. A few members though don't know about the Jedi or have heard of Darth Vader outside the squadron, which is weird for me to think of.

Freed does a great job linking Namir's past to the present without it being confusing or overly done. He also has a deep understanding of the power of names and identities...and sometimes that power is great while other times it is nonexistent.
My only confusion related to time frames stated at the start of each chapter, which were clarified/explained as I read on.

Having a female stormtrooper is a very neat change of pace; even knowing the Imperials only segregated against non-humans, it was rare to read of females in the trooper uniform and not just acting 'behind the scenes' so to speak.

I was constantly interested to know why Chalis, a former Imperial governor, fears Vader and what her secrets are. She and Prelate Verge were annoying at first but grew more interesting as the story went on.
Roach though...Roach was a great character from the start. I wish we could have seen her growth a bit more on screen.

It's sad to hear that the Empire doesn't offer counseling for their troopers. I'm really not surprised, but that stuck out to me, and made me very sad for the fighting Imperials.

My biggest holdup was seeing the word "calculus" written. It didn't jar me out of the 'verse like other Earth words do, but I reread the section it was in a few times with a muddled mind, trying to figure out why something felt strange.

9.2/10

 

Yeah, I definitely got a Black Company vibe from this too.

For me it's a 9/10 - it did everything very well but did stumble towards the end and I'm not seeing much benefit or pay-off to the Thara plotline.