Book Review | Star Wars: Thrawn, Thrawn: Alliances & Thrawn: Treason by Timothy Zahn

As Disney-era canon began to overwrite all pre-existing Star Wars’ literature, one of the losses felt most keenly by readers was that of Mitth’raw’nuruodo - better known in the Galactic Empire as Grand Admiral Thrawn. The eponymous Heir to the Empire was created in the early 1990s by acclaimed novelist Timothy Zahn to lead the remnants of the Imperial war machine against the heroes of the original trilogy in the years following Return of the Jedi. The character proved so popular amongst fans that an entire trilogy of books wasn’t enough to contain him – Thrawn would return later in the decade for the Hand of Thrawn duology, and by the time of Disney’s Lucasfilm acquisition he had touched almost every part of the multimedia Expanded Universe (“EU”).

Above: Luke Skywalker tackles the titular Heir to the Empire

The grand admiral’s absence from the franchise would last for almost two years, but the scale of his triumphant return took much of the sting out of his Disney deletion. In 2016, Disney XD’s Star Wars Rebels introduced the character to a new generation in a new medium. Lars Mikkelsen’s calm and silky tones combined with Lucasfilm’s stunning 3-D animation to create a staggeringly accurate embodiment of Zahn’s prose. Short of a live-action appearance, Thrawn’s resurgence couldn’t have been any more rewarding – particularly as Dave Filoni and his Rebels team were bold enough to play upon the character’s notoriety and mystique, treating the Imperial Navy’s master tactician with the same sort of veneration as they previously had its rankless enforcer. Whereas for two seasons the shadow of Darth Vader had loomed large, Thrawn became an ubiquitous thorn in the Ghost crew’s side – a role that he’d play right up until the series’ dramatic finale.

Above: Thrawn returns in Star Wars Rebels

By necessity, Thrawn’s appearances in Rebels take place much earlier than his stories in what is now the “Legends” continuity, and whilst Rebels leaves the character’s future tantalisingly open, in 2017 Zahn elected to explore the character’s past in his first canonical novel. Simply entitled Thrawn, the expansive tome takes us right back to Thrawn’s first contact with the Galactic Empire before going on to chronicle his gruelling rise to power alongside his unwitting - and initially unwilling – protégé, Eli Vanto.

Discovered on an unnamed planet in the Outer Rim in apparent exile, the Chiss warrior is quick to pledge his loyalty to Emperor Palpatine – so quick, in fact, that it betrays even to Palpatine that he harbours an agenda separate to, albeit potentially compatible with, the wellbeing of the Empire. From the outset, then, we are forced to view Thrawn from another perspective – is he really the pitiless villain that Rebels would have us believe? Or is the truth more complicated than that? Might he even be on a mission for a greater good?

“If I were to serve the Empire, you would command my allegiance.”

Like many of my favourite Star Wars books, Thrawn is an immersive and intimate piece of work, yet it’s one that somehow manages to maintain its central character’s inscrutability even if the face of such exposure. Even authorial omniscience can’t quite crack open that magnificent mind – instead, we marvel at it from Eli’s perspective. Our questions become his. His reluctant stirrings of sympathy become ours. Even more so than with the likes of Tarkin and Darth Vader: Dark Lord of the Sith, this book forces its reader to begrudgingly respect its audacious protagonist.

Such stirrings flow more naturally than one would expect in Thrawn as Zahn portrays him as the ultimate underdog – a blue face in a white sea. With the notable exceptions of Eli and the Emperor, almost every officer that Thrawn serves under or alongside in the Imperial Navy prejudges him because of his blue skin and red eyes, with many going on to be verbally or even physically abusive towards him. As has been observed many times, the Empire is largely comprised of white males with British accents – exotic aliens with ideas above their perceived station do not make perfect poster boys. It’s therefore impossible not to revel in Thrawn’s ever-growing string of little victories over these bigots – he might not take any obvious pleasure in them, but as a reader, it’s hard not to.

Thrawn’s meteoric rise through the ranks is slowed only by his political naïvety, which becomes a recurring problem when dealing with his superiors and even peers. They don’t like Thrawn because of what he is, and they fear him because of what he can do. This lack of finesse is accentuated by the novel’s secondary focus on Arihnda Pryce, the future governor of Lothal featured heavily Rebels, whose fate will eventually become entwined with Thrawn’s. Her own rise to power is the antithesis of Thrawn’s – she is everything that he is not, and vice-versa, which of course makes them extremely useful to one another.

Above: Thrawn alongside Arihnda Pryce in Star Wars Rebels

The new Thrawn trilogy’s central instalment is without a doubt its most alluring, though, as it sees the grand admiral, reeling from his failure to capture the rebels’ Phoenix cell at end of Rebels’ third season, sent with Darth Vader to explore a disturbance in the Force in the Unknown Regions. Seeing Thrawn and Vader sharing a cover will be promise enough for most potential readers, but Thrawn: Alliances’ ambitions extend far beyond exploring the inevitably difficult relationship between two of the Emperor’s most prized weapons. As the story unfolds in the present, Zahn takes us back further than even the preceding novel does, to a time in the Clone Wars when Thrawn encountered Anakin Skywalker on the remote planet where the Emperor’s disturbance now appears to be located. As these two parallel stories progress together, years apart, they unmask the threat now facing both the Galactic Empire and the Chiss Ascendancy – and with it, the identity of the man now buried beneath that famous black suit of armour and the true motivations of the grand admiral holding his leash.

In taking the action out into the Unknown Regions, Zahn also affords himself the opportunity to expound on what little we know of Thrawn’s oligarchical people and the wild space that their Ascendancy inhabits. For example, there is beautiful irony in Vader having to become what the Chiss call a “sky walker”, as he must use the Force to navigate the Chimaera through the labyrinth of solar storms and rogue magnetospheres that would otherwise make the Unknown Regions unpassable. Unfortunately such painstaking groundwork is all but undone by The Rise of Skywalker, which has not only Rey, but also just about every free ship in the galaxy, descend upon Exegol, all thanks to just one Sith wayfinder and a trail of breadcrumbs.

Above: Thrawn: Alliances sees Thrawn sent with Vader to explore a Force disturbance in the Unknown Regions

Far more action-packed than Thrawn, Thrawn: Alliances is still a solidly character-driven story, and one that, perhaps better than any other, showcases why Thrawn is the successful commander that he is. Placing Vader aboard Thrawn’s ship brutally contrasts the two men’s opposing command styles, with Vader inevitably looking to lead through fear and punishment while Thrawn quietly inspires. Some of the book’s most memorable passages feature Thrawn defending his outspoken officers against Vader’s wrath, or see the Sith Lord seethe as he watches the grand admiral encouraging his subordinates and openly valuing their contributions. Eli may be absent from this story, but through Karyn Faro and others like her, Zahn leaves us in no doubt that the crew of the Chimaera would jump into a Sarlacc pit if Thrawn ordered them to because he engenders such trust. Vader, on the other hand, would probably have to call upon the Force to push his lot in.

Thrawn: Alliances is also charged with properly establishing the trilogy’s overarching villains, the Grysks, who seem to be an unapologetic reimagining of the EU’s Yuuzhan Vong. The Grysks may not quite be the extra-galactic threat that the Yuuzhan Vong were, but hailing from the Unknown Regions imbues them with every bit as much mystery, and their presence on the fringes of what is now the Empire as long ago as during the Clone Wars proves that they make their invasion plans just as meticulously. However, whilst physically and tactically there is little to set this race apart from the scourge of the EU, the Grysks’ uncanny ability to subjugate hearts and minds makes them a potentially even more dangerous threat – one that could feasibly threaten both Palpatine’s Empire and the Chiss Ascendancy.

It is this idea that underpins the trilogy’s concluding instalment, Thrawn: Treason, which sees the Chiss grand admiral struggling to reconcile his loyalty to the Empire against his duty to his own people. With the Emperor’s secret Stardust project consuming more and more of the Empire’s resources, Thrawn finds himself drawn into a wager with Director Krennic that puts the funding of Thrawn’s TIE defender programme in jeopardy: either he solves the director’s pest problem within a week, or Thrawn’s TIE defender budget goes to Stardust. However, the grand admiral’s investigations soon reveal that Krennic’s problem isn’t pestilence, but piracy, and the trail leads ineluctably back to the Grysks.

Thrawn: Treason is by far the most engrossing book of the three, largely because it builds so well upon the previous two. Throughout the trilogy Thrawn’s opposition to the Death Star project has been quietly ticking over in the background, but it is only here that it becomes plain that the power to annihilate entire worlds would render Thrawn’s tactical acumen redundant. As such, when the Chiss arrive, Thrawn’s former protégé Eli Vanto now amongst their ranks, the grand admiral has never been more torn.

Above: Every saga has a beginning... Thrawn will return this summer in Thrawn Ascendancy: Chaos Rising

On one level, Thrawn: Treason is a bit of a cheat. Once again, Thrawn’s duty to the Chiss Ascendancy and fealty to the Empire prove to be compatible, and the treason of the book’s title is not his, but another’s. On another level, though, it’s incredibly satisfying as it sees Thrawn notch up one impressive victory after another, culminating in a masterful strategic display which sees him defeat his adversary from the bridge of the enemy ship and without costing the Empire a single life. Yet despite this, Thrawn’s political gaucherie sees him walk straight into Krennic’s semantic trap, reinforcing the building sense that, for all his prodigious talent, the grand admiral has no place in a navy backed up by a Death Star. Of course, shortly after the events of this book, he won’t have one – Ezra Bridger sees to that.

Above: The Last Command, or what might have been in The Rise of Skywalker...?

The only disappointing aspect of this trilogy is its failure – or, perhaps more accurately, the movies’ failure – to tie these stories into what we see in cinemas. How was Thrawn not cast in the Allegiant General Pryde role in The Rise of Skywalker, when he’s served as Palpatine’s sole advisor on the Unknown Regions? Why do these books not see Thrawn take an active role in Palpatine’s seeding of the Unknown Regions with shipyards? The missed opportunities and slaps in the face are incredibly frustrating, and seemingly miss the whole point of rebooting Star Wars canon.

Not one to let something like erasure from history get in his way, Thrawn’s successful return in Star Wars Rebels has now led to the creation of this new body of work that, in many respects, eclipses what came before in the EU. These three books rank amongst the finest Star Wars literature ever written, canonical or otherwise.

Star Wars: Thrawn is available to download from iTunes’ iBooks Store and Amazon for £1.99. iTunes also have an unabridged audiobook available to download for £15.99. Amazon ask £28.08 for the exact same product as they want you to subscribe to their Audible service rather than own your own media.

Star Wars: Thrawn - Alliances is available to download from iTunes’ iBooks Store and Amazon for £4.99. The audiobook is also available to download from iTunes for £7.99 or from Amazon for £20.99.

Star Wars: Thrawn - Treason is available to download from iTunes’ iBooks Store and Amazon for £9.99. Notably the audiobook is cheaper than the text version on iTunes - the download will cost you just £7.99. Amazon ask £22.74.