I knew I was in for an experience with Delilah Dawson’s Star Wars novel Inquisitor: Rise of the Red Blade when I looked at the first page of the book and found that it contained a trigger warning for the fact that, over the course of the novel, a character commits suicide. I was blindsided a bit - I don’t expect Star Wars to handle such delicate material. Whatever hesitation or trepidation I may have had was assuaged as Dawson’s novel ended up the most emotionally intense novel in the franchise that I have ever read. I was frankly astounded.
The novel is, ultimately, a novel about the process of radicalizing terrorists, but the terrorists are the dark side. Such organizations prey on a very particular type of person: the isolated, the disaffected, the angry, the sort of person who is utterly dissatisfied with their lot in life and is prone to lashing out. Your potential terrorist here is Iskat Akaris, a padawan of the Jedi Order of an unknown species from an unknown planet, with no heritage to look back towards and no approval from the Order to be found. Her master is cold, her peers hate her for an attempt of demonstrating ability with the Force having gone dangerously awry, and her duties frustrate her and bore her in every measure.
But the other side of terrorist radicalization is the side that our media and our governments like to pretend does not exist. It is the society around these disaffected people that makes them disaffected in the first place. For white nationalist terrorists today, their recruiting grounds are angry young white men who haven’t got what they feel they’ve earned (or in many cases, entitled - be that status or prestige or women or money). For Islamist terrorists, their recruiting grounds are majority-Muslim areas of Western countries that are neglected by their governments, never allowed to truly be neighbors by societies that hate them. It is then unsurprising that groups like al-Qaeda or ISIS or al-Shabaab fill the void, offering them a righteous cause and a pacific Jannah for the price of committing murder.
That uncaring, miserable environment in this novel is the Jedi Temple. The Jedi Order has always had this mystical component to it, a sort of space opera version of an Eastern monastic order, with added martial arts and laser swords. Here, that religious element is brought forth, and it is not simply a religion; in this novel, the Jedi Order is a cult. The Masters tell Iskat again and again that the Order cannot fail; the Order can only be failed. That is the message the Order gives her again and again; her feelings are invalid, her problems are irrelevant, and her suffering is a sin. For daring to stand up, to be herself, she is punished.
The way Dawson writes the Jedi Order in this novel reminded me of the writing of people who have left toxic religious organizations; the one I’ve read the most is Chrissy Stroop, an exvangelical writer who has gone into great detail about the toxicity of American evangelical culture; similar writers have talked about the miseries inflicted by the Catholic Church, or the Jehovah’s Witnesses, or the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons), among many others (not all of them Christian). The throughline through all of these groups is that they create a problem and market the solution. A toxic Evangelical church will deny its members the right to consume secular media. The Jehovah’s Witnesses discourage its members to have friends outside the Church. The Catholic Church denies its followers the ability to have a healthy relationship to sexuality (or a sex life at all to queer people). The Mormon Church discourages its followers from reading about Mormon history from outside approved sources. And the Jedi Order denies its younglings any outside attachment, any family, any love. The Jedi Order only offers a laundry list of obligations, a culture of silence, and a demand for utter obedience.
Dawson has created this setting of the Jedi Temple that is just suffocating. The most aggravating thing, for the reader and for Iskat, is that the Order simply does not view a padawan as a being entitled to the dignity of reason. Again and again and again, she is met with thought-terminating cliches that resolve no issues, solve no problems, ease any tensions. Even as she is proven right in the field of battle, they find reasons to demote her and snub her.
She is discontented, but crucially, she is also violent. She feels at her most self-actualized when she is fighting. She is first deployed at the Battle of Geonosis not long after the first shots of the Clone Wars were fired, and she revels in slaughtering Geonosians. She goes against orders on a subsequent mission, creating diplomatic headaches, but even the Order has to admit that she was effective. You would hope that the Order would find a way to channel this aggression in a useful way, if only on the battlefield, but instead they assign her to teach children. Teaching is of course a worthy calling but it is clearly not the best use of her talents.
From there, the plot rolls on with the inevitability of a boulder running down a mountain, crushing everything before it. Iskat is Yoda’s maxim personified: fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, and hate leads to suffering. Yoda was speaking on the individual level, within the confines of a single conscience, but here you see a version that interplays between individual and broader society. The Jedi fear Iskat, and she fears the Order in turn. The Jedi come to rage at Iskat, leading her to rage at the Order in turn. The Jedi, ultimately, inflict much suffering on Iskat, and Iskat takes all the fury that has welled up within her and unleashes it on the galaxy at large.
The tragedy of the whole thing is enhanced by the possibility of another outcome. There is a sequence where Iskat finds her homeworld (discovered, by pure chance, after someone she meets on a mission recognizes her species) and visits it. This is a world that has decided to reject galactic civilization entirely. There are no starports on this planet, as they have only received misery and death from the merchants from the sky. They are the Sentinelese of this universe, or perhaps the Piraha; they have rejected any attempt to be made ‘legible’ by galactic civilization. They are the highland people of Zomia. They are also reminiscent of the residents of Hydros, the planet of seas and of archipelagos from Robert Silverberg’s novel The Face of the Waters (which I had the fortune to read not long before this novel), a planet whose indigenous species rejects space travel, and whose human colonists came with the knowledge they would never leave.
All of that is to say that her homeworld is a place where Iskat could have existed without all the cruelties and, bluntly, bullshit of the Jedi Order. This is a place where Iskat could have chosen to be Iskat, to be her own person among her own kind. You see in the people here someone who Iskat could have been without the cruelty of galactic civilization. The tragedy of it all comes when Iskat decides she has to leave, to be involved in the misery of the universe. She hasn't been corrupted so much as she has been angled into following a logic of decision-making that can lead only to destruction. And that is what is so painful about it - Dawson has persuaded you that this could have ended no other way.
There is something about the way that Dawson has conjured her images that is so striking in this book. There are multiple images in this novel that I can recall very well some time after reading it. The best of these, by far, is the ending, the last shot of the movie in your mind, that has the cinematic, epic, romantic quality of many great works of film, the Star Wars films themselves by no means the only example. It is that last image, that last painful, searing image, that made me wish that Disney would have the chutzpah to adapt this into a visual format.
I remember feeling a very, very slight twinge of offense when I read that Denis Villeneuve described his Dune movies as ‘Star Wars for adults.’ Realistically, of course, I know what he meant, and I know George Lucas made the first film for children in the style of the serials of his own childhood, and I know how it’s marketed, and Villeneuve’s films are astounding. This book, I think, is what Star Wars for adults, if that is a thing that should be brought into existence to begin with, should look like. There are a lot of meaty ideas in here that a child may not be able to digest (but a brainy teenager, on the other hand, I suspect would profit very much from this). I am confident in saying that this is one of the best works the franchise has produced. If Disney is brave they will pay for more like it, and hopefully from Delilah Dawson.
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Reference: Dawson, Delilah Inquisitor: Rise of the Red Blade [Random House Worlds, 2023]
POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.
