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language: English
country: USA
year: 2015
form: novel
genre(s): science fiction
series: Star Wars
dates read: 21.6.23-29.6.23
in my ongoing quest for “everyday life in the Rebellion”, I listened to the audiobook of Alexander Freed’s Battlefront: Twilight Company, which is set primarily in the period from roughly six months before to six months after the Battle of Hoth. it wasn’t exactly what I’m looking for, but it was one of the closest things I’ve yet found, and it was pretty good!
the novel follows the activities of “Twilight Company”, a Rebel infantry company (with a single space escort vehicle), focalized through the man currently known as Hazram Namir, a former child soldier and veteran of several wars on his home planet — a “backwater” that left him mostly ignorant of the galaxy at large, though he does his best to conceal this ignorance — who has no investment in the Rebel cause as such: he simply doesn’t know how to do anything but fight, and the Rebellion currently seems like the best place for him to do that. over the course of the novel, predictably, he slowly comes to grasp the real stakes of the Rebellion and to value the ideals championed by his commanding officer (who dies at Hoth).
the novel is interspersed with a few other perspectives, primarily glimpses of Namir’s past at several different points during his life but also one passage from the perspective of another member of his squad, several from the perspective of an Imperial officer tasked with hunting down Twilight Company (under the command of a young Imperial zealot who’s implied to literally worship the Emperor) to retrieve or kill the ex-Imperial defector who has been providing them with information, and a bunch from a stormtrooper stationed on Sullust. the stormtrooper interludes are a frankly kind of harrowing look at collaboration and the ways states condition their soldiers. one of my hesitations about the novel is that because Namir initially actively rejects many of the Rebellion’s principles it at times feel like the novel is indicating that both sides are cults of personality whose soldiers bond with each other through their shared trauma, but it does eventually mostly move away from this.
much of the novel is focused on battles and military activities — most notably the Battle of Hoth, which we see through Namir’s eyes, including a terrifying encounter with Vader, and the Battle of Sullust — but it also does include a lot of downtime, and this was the highlight for me: playing cards, sharing stories, funeral rites, shore leave, laying low after Hoth, … I still want to see more details of life in Rebel flotillas and at Rebel bases, but this scratched a bit of the itch. the battles were also well-written and evoked the kinds of emotional responses they were meant to.
on a technical level, the writing was pretty good! there were sometimes I noticed — especially in audiobook — some efforts at poetic or sound effects, some alliteration. the audiobook reader’s phrasing was kind of bad, but the prose came over pretty well in spite of that. the audiobook was accompanied by (some) music and sound effects, all of which were noticeably lower quality quality than the actual reading; this created an interesting if presumably unintentional effect where the whole thing sounded like a podcast or an old radio drama.
moods: adventurous, dark, grimy, hopeful, tense