Allegiance (Star Wars)
by Timothy Zahn
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Book Summary Information
Author: Timothy ZahnEdition: Mass Market Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2007-12-26
ISBN: 0345477391
Number of pages: 432
Publisher: LucasBooks
Book Reviews of Allegiance (Star Wars)
Book Review: ...A really bad feeling about this...
Summary: 1 Stars
Let me preface this by saying that I've loved virtually all of Zahn's Star Wars novels to date and tend to blaze through them like the pages are on fire. The "Hand of Thrawn" duology might have been kind of slow, but the more recent "Outbound Flight" was great and the original "Thrawn Trilogy" was just classic.
So I was rather surprised when it took me three attempts and a final, concerted act of willpower to get through Allegiance.
I wanted to like it. I really did. But Allegiance was something that I hadn't expected a Star Wars novel to be: it possessed the fatal flaw of being extremely boring. Others will obviously disagree, but I found nothing in this novel to really connect to. The characters were all tepid at best, lifeless cutouts that utterly resisted my every attempt to know or like them. The new renegade Stormtrooper characters are boring, and there was so little difference between them character-wise that I found myself forgetting which was which for the first half of the book, and then eventually gave up the effort for the second half and discovered that it didn't actually matter if you could tell them apart. They might as well have been clones for all it mattered. The Stormtroopers are just dull, their desertion and escape from the Empire convenient, contrived, and unconvincing. Their main role in the plot is to shoot stuff and provide angst about their desertion. I hope we never hear from them again, because honestly I can't think of a single thing that they could add.
A few classic characters from the movies star as well: Luke, Leia, Han, Chewie, and cameos by Vader and Palpatine. As characters, they are remarkably poorly-written. Zahn's rendition of Luke, Leia, Han, etc. in his books has never been great, but this is a low point. Luke is useless and annoying. Leia is written blandly and spends the book doing bland things (including, at one point, waiting tables and shooting at drain pipes). And Han is polite and reasonable with everyone, with nary a trace of sarcasm, wit, or personality.
Zahn's own Mara Jade is another major player in the book, and while I've always been a fan of her, this is a very weak rendition, and with good reason. I think that many people will squeal with glee at the prospect of seeing Mara in her prime, as the Emperor's Hand, carrying out Palpatine's dirty work without actually being a dark Jedi or anything. Personally I was bracing myself for it, and my fears were confirmed: Mara Jade in this book has practically no personality. She is entirely defined by her uber-powers, her elite assassin/espionage abilities, her Force use, innovative lightsaber skills, etc. This might be in part my personal vendetta against the stereotypical "elite assassin" character that has been proliferating in literature over the last ten years, but Mara Jade really has no personality here. She's like an empty shell stuffed with assassination and infiltration skills. If you want to see her doing "cool stuff," then I can see the appeal. But you could use a find-and-replace tool to change every reference to "Mara Jade" in the text to "Belinda Stronach" and the characterization would be just as accurate. She's faceless, and that's a real shame.
There are also a few character moments that are just downright silly and make me wonder what Zahn was thinking when he wrote this. Here's a few of my least-favorite examples, some of which I've already mentioned: Han being nice to everyone. Leia waiting tables. Vader throwing a temper tantrum and attacking Mara Jade for absolutely no reason. "Captain Ozzel" and his dumb, convoluted plan to murder a high-ranking Imperial agent. Vader sitting at a computer terminal doing research at the library (okay okay, this is a personal quibble, but every time I go to a public library there's always a bunch of homeless guys slouched at the free Internet access stations, and I could not get this image out of my mind when I read about the Dark Lord of the Sith doing the same thing). Just silly things that really poisoned my reading of the book.
There's other stuff I could whine about, but I'll cut this short. The action's okay, but there's too much talking and being reasonable and rational when people should just be doing interesting things. I've noticed this with Zahn before, but never to this extent. But for me, it all comes down to characters. If you can't pitch me good, believable, compelling characters, then you won't have my attention and I probably won't finish your book. I finished this one in tribute to Zahn's earlier Star Wars work, but consider it a waste of time and effort. The characters were all badly rendered, and the plot was structured entirely around the characters; there wasn't even any particularly big plot points going on to take our attention away from the weakness of the characters. It was all small, piddling stuff centered around a bunch of boring, lifeless protagonists.
I really wanted to like this, and I really want to like what Zahn writes for Star Wars in the future, if he continues at it. But this weak effort speaks to me of someone who's about to hang up his spurs and call it a day. And maybe that's for the best.
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