James Luceno’s specialty is the biography of an institution wearing a person’s name. Tarkin is the purest example: a novel that is genuinely excellent for roughly half its length, and that half is entirely flashback.
The Eriadu material
Tarkin’s upbringing on the Carrion Plateau — a family that deliberately abandoned its children in hostile country to see what came back — is the best thing in the book and the best thing Luceno wrote for canon. It is not a trauma explanation. It is a curriculum. The Tarkins believed that fear, correctly applied, produces order, and they tested the hypothesis on their own sons. Everything the man later does to a galaxy is that curriculum scaled up, and the novel makes the connection without once stating it.
The present-tense plot
Which is where it falls apart. Tarkin’s personal corvette is stolen by insurgents, and he and Darth Vader spend the novel chasing it. That is a thin premise for a two-hundred-and-eighty-page book about the design of tyranny, and the chase never becomes interesting on its own terms. The insurgents are ciphers. The pursuit is procedural. There is no antagonist worthy of the man the flashbacks have built.
Tarkin and Vader
The partnership works. Two servants of the same master, neither of whom can be told anything about the other, circling with wary professional respect — Luceno gets real value out of the fact that Tarkin is one of the only people in the galaxy who is not frightened of Darth Vader and has thought carefully about why. Their scenes are the reason to keep reading through the middle.
Continuity load
Luceno cannot help himself. The novel is threaded with connective tissue — the Imperial power structure, the early Death Star programme, the Emperor’s methods of keeping subordinates unsure of each other — and some of it is genuinely illuminating about how the Empire in A New Hope came to be shaped that way. Some of it is furniture-arranging for its own sake.
Where it sits
Published November 2014, second novel of the rebuilt canon. It works well alongside Catalyst, which covers the same institutional ground from the scientists’ side, and it makes Thrawn: Treason funnier.
Who should read it
Read it for the Eriadu chapters and the Vader scenes; skim the chase. If you only want the thesis, the dossier has it in a page. If you want to feel it, the flashbacks are worth the whole book.
