I want to be precise about the claim, because “best Star Wars book” is a bar fight and I am not interested in that. The claim is narrower: Revenge of the Sith, novelised by Matthew Stover and published by Del Rey in 2005, is the best-written book on this shelf. Sentence for sentence, paragraph for paragraph, it is doing more with English than anything else here.
The four books
Stover wrote four Star Wars novels. Traitor (Del Rey, 2002), which sits inside the New Jedi Order sequence and is the most philosophically aggressive thing in the whole run. Shatterpoint (Del Rey, June 2003), a Clone Wars novel built on the bones of Heart of Darkness, and by extension on Apocalypse Now. The Revenge of the Sith novelisation (2005). And Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor (Del Rey, December 2008), which is a much stranger book than its title suggests.
Four books is not many. It is enough to establish a voice, and the voice is unmistakable: second person address, present tense intrusions, refrains that repeat and mutate, and a willingness to stop the plot dead to tell you what a thing means.
What a novelisation is for
Most film novelisations are transcription with adverbs. They exist to be bought at an airport by someone who wants the film again. Stover’s does something else: it treats the screenplay as a structure to be argued with rather than a text to be reproduced.
The film shows you a Jedi failing. The novel tells you why the failure was structural — that an order which had spent a thousand years being right about the danger of attachment had also spent a thousand years being unable to distinguish attachment from love. That argument is not in the film. It is not smuggled in against the film either. It is a reading of the film, written by someone who clearly thought hard about it, and the tie-in format is the only place it could have been published.
The obvious objection
It is a stylistic performance, and stylistic performances divide people. The refrains — the “this is how it feels” passages — are either the best thing in the book or an affectation you have to read past, and I have never seen anyone land in the middle. If you found the prose overwrought, you are not wrong about what it is doing. You have simply weighted it differently to me.
Where to start with him
Not here. Start with Shatterpoint, which is a cleaner introduction to the voice and does not require you to have re-watched a film. Del Rey reissued it in the Essential Legends Collection in June 2021, so it is easy to find. Then read the novelisation. Then, if you want to see how far he will push it, read Traitor — and be prepared for a Star Wars novel where two characters spend most of the page count arguing about the nature of reality.
Opinion column. The books, publishers and dates above are verifiable; the ranking is mine.
