You don’t need to have seen a Star Wars movie, or played the Battlefront game, to read Star Wars Battlefront: Twilight Company. It’s a story that could be set in any universe. Alexander Freed has done such a good job of setting the scene and introducing the characters, you could be completely ignorant of all things Star Wars and still get caught up in the story.
Of course, the book is a lot more fun when you recognize someone you know.
The book starts shortly before Empire Strikes Back. The Rebellion celebrated the destruction of the Death Star for a while, and made some advances into Empire territory. It didn’t last long. By the time the book starts the advance has turned into a withdrawal, then a full retreat. The Rebellion has returned to fighting for every inch of ground they hold, recruiting from whatever world they’ve landed on to replace everyone who died in the last battle.
Twilight Company (the Sixty-First Mobile Infantry, if you’re being formal) has been fighting for so long it’s almost more out of habit than anything else. Their captain (called Howl by the troops, but only when he’s not around) is probably as crazy as he is brilliant, but he sees a larger plan for the rebellion, and somehow inspires his soldiers to keep fighting.
Freed does an excellent job with a huge cast. Members of Twilight Company are quickly introduced, but their personalities and quirks are so well described, you find yourself attached to them in the space of a couple pages. (Careful with that, though; I’ll say right now it’s impossible to predict who’ll survive to the end of the book. Several of my best guesses turned out wrong, and they were some of my favorites.)
Namir is the character we see most often in the book, and he’s amazingly likable, and very believably flawed. He’s a good soldier, and has good instincts and a lot of common sense. But he never pretends to be extremely smart or educated. He’s not an idiot, but he admits his weaknesses, even if they bother the hell out of him, as when he was briefly stationed in his least favorite part of a ship: the bridge. He was surrounded by people who knew exactly what made the ship work when he didn’t know what a single instrument was for.
Namir didn’t mind space travel, but he bristled at reminders of his ignorance. The mere existence of the bridge needled him.
Namir often assists in recruiting and training new soldiers (“fresh meat”) for Twilight Company, and we get to see a protective side to him, even when the newbies drive him crazy, as they often do.
There was a quick aside about new recruits picking new names for themselves, and Namir thought there’d already been more than enough “Leia’s” and other “heroes of the rebellion” chosen by starry eyed soldiers. Though, he admitted, they usually died off pretty quick, since their enthusiasm was greater than their common sense.
I also like how we get his viewpoint of things that are familiar to us, but completely new to him. Seeing Hoth through his eyes made me visualize it better than I have in years: after all the times I’ve seen Empire Strikes Back I’ve forgotten how interesting that base really is.
And unlike us, he didn’t grow up hearing about one of the worst villains of the Empire. He barely even knows the name, and isn’t impressed when he hears it.
Namir snorted. “What is it with you people and Vader?” he asked. “It can’t be the helmet that scares people. Stormtroopers have helmets.”
Namir’s just one of three main characters, the others being Tabor, a highly placed advisor in the Empire, and Thara, a female stormtrooper.
Tabor has been called out of retirement to assist in the search and capture of a renegade governor. His chapters are on the thoughtful side; he wishes he was back home teaching students, drinking tea, and staying far away from insane captains who have prisoners tortured in the dining room while you’re trying to eat breakfast. Tabor is loyal to the Empire, but he certainly sees a few flaws.
Thara joined the stormtroopers as a way to help support her family and friends; on her poverty-stricken world there’s not many jobs outside the mining companies. But what started out as work quickly became a passion: she believes in the Empire, and believes in herself when she’s wearing her uniform, even when she has to do jobs she doesn’t like very much (arresting citizens for minor infractions, knowing that they may be locked away for months, isn’t one of her favorite activities.)
I liked how when Thara is in her stormtrooper armor, her internal monologue is always coming from 475, her official designation. Whole chapters will go by where we never see the name Thara, only 475. That changes in life-and-death situations though: at the worst possible moments she always thinks of herself as Thara.
There’s also an interesting story about a boy on a planet who grows up fighting on the side of one tribe after another, always following whatever tyrant was offering food and shelter, never believing in any of them. I’m surprised it took me as long as it did to figure out why the story was being told. It was a pleasant surprise.
All in all, the descriptions in the book were very nicely done, giving a lot of detail without slowing down the pace. The characters always felt very real to me, very easy to visualize.
Descriptions of battles (hard to do in detail sometimes without coming off as wordy and confusing) flowed very well, moving quickly but still giving a very clear idea of what was happening. I tended to enjoy the interactions between people more than the battles, but I still liked the war scenes as well, and that’s saying something (I always skip past the battle scenes in Return of the King so I can get back to what Sam and Frodo are up to.)
Freed has a lot of experience writing for video games, and it’s easy to see how all of Twilight Company’s missions would work well in a game. They stand on their own, but fit together in the larger story of the war; hijacking an Imperial freighter to salvage parts, fighting off the hijacking of their own ship, working underground to plant bombs in a mining facility, and a series of smaller battles that all lead to an attack on a major Imperial target.
The thing is, the stories don’t feel like they were shoehorned into a game scenario. It’s all a very interesting, totally logical plot that works as a book about war and the soldiers in the trenches, and as a book that fits into the larger Star Wars universe.
And while Freed certainly knows about how to construct a story for a game, his knowledge about war in general goes a lot farther than game mechanics. There are large-scale battle strategies, improvised funeral rituals when there’s no body to bury, sabotage techniques that still work when a third of your squad is dead, coping mechanisms for when you’ve lost a limb; he’s made a study of war in general and tells it on a very human level.
(Well, on a personal level anyway, since several of my favorite characters weren’t exactly human.)
I wasn’t sure I wanted to read this book, because I haven’t even glanced at the Battlefront game. Turns out I didn’t have to worry. The story is interesting right from the first chapter, and it’s not intended to only work within the boundaries of the game.
And while it’s a great Star Wars book (I loved all the familiar faces and places) it can really stand on its own. It’s a story about war, but it’s also a story about why people choose the things they do. Some people follow a passion, some people a job, and some people just don’t have anything left, so they’ll follow whatever someone else tells them to follow.
Every single one of the characters in the book made very deliberate choices to get where they are. All the major characters are fascinating, but sometimes the information Freed gives us about a minor character is so fleeting but interesting, I found myself hoping he’d write a whole book about them.
Even when they died. Especially when they died.