Star Wars: The Last Jedi by Jason Fry

An excellent adaptation

I had mixed feelings about the film of The Last Jedi, and I still haven’t completely decided whether I liked it or not. But this novelization really can’t be faulted; Jason Fry brings out the best of the story, and enlivens the characters. The extra scenes added under the supervision of the film’s director Rian Johnson all add wonderfully to the story and the Star Wars universe.

This novelization can be very favourably compared with the previous one, Alan Dean Foster’s adaptation of The Force Awakens, which was serviceable, but only skated over the surfaces of many of the characters, leaving them resembling cardboard cutouts of themselves. Here, by contrast, Fry dives deep into the characters and actually allows them to have real feelings. I really appreciated in particular how he portrayed Leia’s feelings about her failure to save Alderaan and the Hosnian system, an aspect of her character that I feel is often left criminally underexplored. After all, the destruction of a whole star system with a Death Star-like superweapon does, in a sense, represent a colossal failure on the part of the original trilogy heroes, that all but wipes out their achievement in those films. It makes total sense that Leia would feel the weight of that failure.

I also really enjoyed the way Fry wrote about the Force. His eloquent descriptions of its workings breathed new life into the concept, felt spiritually plausible, and added valuable tidbits to Star Wars’ canon, whilst still feeling wholly consistent with things we learned from the prequels. This I suspect has much to do with Fry’s background as an author of reference books for the franchise, like the Essential Atlas. His deep understanding of and love for the franchise is clear.

Some of the reservations I had about the film are still present in the story, such as the seemingly-easily-avoidable Poe/Holdo conflict. I think that, given that story, this novelization is perhaps the best possible adaptation; the ability to delve into the characters’ motivations gives more justification for their actions and helps the reader suspend disbelief, in a way that’s more difficult to accomplish on film.

The icing on the cake for this audio edition is Marc Thompson’s narration. Thompson also narrated The Force Awakens’ audiobook, and again The Last Jedi is a huge step up. Having a few years to work on his impressions of Rey and Finn, etc after the release of that first film clearly paid off, but that’s not the only improvement: Thompson’s impression of Carrie Fisher is the best I’ve ever heard here. For some reason hers seems to be a very difficult voice to imitate, and is one of the few that the Star Wars universe had never really found a good soundalike for. But here Thompson really nails it! All of his voices make this not just an excellent novelization, but an excellent audio production as well.

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