“Evil?” Plagueis repeated. “What is that? Moments ago you defined yourself as a storm. You said you were death itself. Are you evil, then, or are you simply stronger and more awake than others?”
The question that Darth Sidious’s Master asks his new apprentice is probably the simplest demonstration of the difference between the Light side of the Force and the Dark. Or at least the way that the Sith see their role in the Force. And no one typifies this outlook more than the wealthy banker and secret Sith Lord from the planet Muunilinst, Hugo Damask.
Darth Plagueis is an in-depth exploration of the Star Wars Sith Lord first mentioned in Revenge of the Sith. The novel begins and ends with the death of the title character, and covers several decades of his life as he manipulates history to bring about the eventual downfall of the Jedi while searching for the secret of immortal life. The story is filled with plots and political maneuverings which are, in a lot of cases, way over my head.
Several reviewers have pointed out that this isn’t really a story about Darth Plagueis, but the story of the transformation of his apprentice, Darth Sidious. It’s a fair comment; Plagueis drives most of the action (which doesn’t amount to a lot; this book is heavier on exposition than it is on fight scenes), and it’s his Grand Plan that is supposedly going to destroy the Jedi. But we all spend the book waiting for his apprentice to take control and kill his Master.
And that’s apparently how the Sith Master/Apprentice relationship always works. The Rule of Two, as it’s called. Plagueis talks a good game about how this time it’s going to be different, not because he cares even a little bit about keeping his apprentice alive (he doesn’t) but because…we’ll I’m not really all that clear on why it’s supposed to be different. It’s not like he ever takes on any other apprentices, so there’s still just one Master and one Apprentice. And Sith training methods involve deprivation and suffering and a hell of a lot of mind-games (Plagueis manipulates Sidious into killing his entire family, and then tells Sidious that’s exactly what he did), so every interaction just gives the apprentice one more reason to eventually kill his master.
A driving factor in Plagueis at least wanting to have more than one Sith Lord in place (even if he doesn’t give his apprentice much reason to want to keep his master alive) is so he can rule from the shadows, letting his former apprentice deal with all of the day-to-day business of being in charge (and being the target for assassination attempts) so Plagueis can continue all his research into living forever…
…research involving midi-chlorians, which was one of the sticking points for me with this book. The entire midi-chlorian storyline was one of the things I hated about the prequels, and I really need to let that go because it became pretty important in the Expanded Universe. And there’s also a lot of fascinating details that the author explores about these things, even coming up with a decent explanation for why a certain Chosen One with a high midi-chlorian count could have been conceived by the Force itself.
I think this book must appeal to the most hard-core Star Wars fans because it’s packed with an amount of information that would have been easier to swallow if I’d read ever single Expanded Universe book that came before. It’s helpful to read this with a ready access to Wookiepedia, because I lost count of the different aliens who made an appearance and who required a quick image search so I could get a mental picture of how many eyestalks or how much fur was covering whoever happened to be speaking at any given time.
And not just aliens, there’s also the different federations, and unions, and crime syndicates, and planetary governments, and career politicians, and everyone has a different agenda and alliances change at a moment’s notice, and Plagueis is playing a long game with about a thousand different variables. There were times where I just had to smile and nod and keep reading until I could get to a scene where Plagueis slaughters the entire crew of a ship or sets a plan in motion that will eventually lead to the something that happens in the Star Wars movies.
Luceno does a good job with these parts, weaving the different storylines together to lead to those nice moments of “Oh hey, it’s that guy…” There are quite a few callbacks to the movies, not surprising since Luceno had to work fairly closely with George Lucas in order to make the history of these characters mesh with (what was at the time) established canon. At the same time, the plot stands on its own without falling into the trap that a lot of prequels do when the entire book is nothing but clumsy back-story: “This is how this started. And this is how THIS started.” That kind of connect-the-dots storyteling always leaves me cold, and Luceno manages to avoid it.
What the author really succeeds at though is setting an entire book from the point of view of the “bad-guy” characters, and giving them more depth than just two-dimensional evil status. The two main characters do have pretty shocking lack of compassion for, well, everybody, but it’s a necessary outlook in order to revitalize the galaxy. To the Sith, the Dark Side is the real Force, and the version that the Jedi use is a pale imitation. In the eyes of the Plagueis and his apprentice, the Jedi are stagnant force,keeping the status quo and letting the galaxy rot from within while hanging on to a useless idea about compassion and justice. And it’s hard to argue with the fact that the Republic is crumbling under its own weight. The Sith are the ones who can bring about welcome change.
Welcome, as long as you’re not one of the millions of individuals that suffer because of it.