Suzannah Rowntree's Reviews > Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith

The year is 2020. As the world burns, I decide that you only live once, and award a full five stars to a (*checks notes*) film novelisation good gravy.

It's SO GOOD, people.

In my recent rewatch of the Star Wars canon I saw ROTS for the second time ever and, despite the story's faults, fell resoundingly in love. I had for years heard excellent things about the Stover novelisation, so thought I'd give it a whirl.

I often find that a flawed book, when remade into a film, improves on its previous iteration. The same element is at work here: the flawed film, in this case, has given birth to a magnificently crafted novel. Stover doesn't hew too closely to the original script, instead retelling the story in his own words and for the most part with his own dialogue. The result, much as I love the film, is by far the more even and brilliant artwork. Here, Stover truly embraces the idiosyncratic strengths of the novel form to flesh out the story. Runtime isn't an issue, so he restores the subplot deleted from the film in which Padme joins with other Senators in laying the groundwork for the rebellion. But by far the most brilliant thing Stover does with the format of the novel is dig deep into the characters' interiority, fleshing out the story world, the Force, the characters' motivations and backstory, and above all their feelings.

I recently realised that the reason I love Star Wars and have rarely found another space opera comparable, is that it's a medieval knightly romance in space. It has all the tropes of that genre: Jedi for knights, Padawans for squires, the Force for the Holy Grail, cool spaceships for cool horses, lightsabres for swords, the endlessly diverse reaches of space for the endlessly mysterious forest through which it seems you never take the same path twice. Both are fundamentally aristocratic artforms, peopled with knights and princesses who face monsters and journey on quests. Stover's novelisation takes it a little bit further. If you've read medieval and renaissance epics, one of the delights of this genre is the factor of retelling. The thing is, almost all the characters are people we've seen before in other artforms, and yet there's a ceremonious pleasure in reintroducing these familiar characters (Lancelot, Charlemagne, Obi-Wan Kenobi) afresh for a new retelling. You know who the character is. You don't need to be told. But you are there simply for the pleasure of hearing it all said in a new way. Stover does this, pausing the jam-packed action of the book repeatedly simply for the pleasure of introducing these characters all over again. Look, he says, I know which genre I am in. This is knightly epic. We have ceremonies to observe.

It's so gorgeously written, all the way to the final line. I knew the final line. I've seen it quoted everywhere, I just didn't know it was from this book, and in context with the rest of the story it came as a powerful, tear-jerking bit of catharsis. So, how legendary is this novelisation? Well, I'm not particularly active in the Star Wars fandom, but beyond the final line, whole passages of this thing were somehow known to me via osmosis. Stover's writing is absolutely unique and instantly recognisable - iconic in a way that few original stories are, much less a film tie-in novel. The last time I had this experience was that time I read Milton, rather late, and could never get more than a few lines along without bumping into some famous quotation.

This is a truly great novel in its own right, one which has already been going strong for fifteen years and will no doubt continue much longer. If you like Star Wars at all, or even if you just love tragic epic fantasy with a slightly pulpy edge and villains making hilarious puns while slaughtering people, I can't recommend this book highly enough.