Patrick’s Spoiler Free Review: Timothy Zahn Makes a Triumphant Return With Thrawn!

He is a genius tactician with an uncanny ability to find his opponents’ weaknesses not merely by examining their battle strategies and armament, but also by studying their art and their culture. He is a powerful Imperial Grand Admiral who (usually!) deals with the failure of his subordinates not with summary execution, but by encouraging them to use the lessons of their failure to hone their martial skills and creative abilities. He is blue-skinned, red-eyed non-human who holds one of the highest positions in an Empire with a decidedly human-centric bias.

He is… Thrawn!!

Assisting Thrawn along the way is his aide, Ensign Eli Vanto. We first meet Vanto during a clever variation on the Strikefast planetary expedition from Zahn’s 1995 short story “Mist Encounter.” Events play out in a virtually identical fashion in the Thrawn novel, with the Imperials investigating a deserted encampment, and the encampment’s owner, Thrawn, using the natural environment and the Imperials’ own fear against them in a Rambo-style commando operation intended to provide an opening for him to sneak aboard the Strikefast. Here, Thrawn manipulates the starship’s commander, Captain Voss Parck, into bringing him back to Coruscant for an audience with the Emperor.

However, whereas in “Mist Encounter” it was the Imperial team’s 3P0 unit who examined the markings on the planetside encampment’s equipment, in the Thrawn novel, Zahn casts Eli Vanto in that role. When we first meet him, Eli is still a mere cadet who intends to build on his experience in his family’s shipping business to pursue a safe, predictable career as an Imperial supply officer. Since he hails from Wild Space and, through his shipping company experience, has developed passing familiarity with many of that region’s lesser-known languages and dialects, Eli has been ordered to accompany the expeditionary team.

And, of course, it is this seemingly temporary diversion from his study of ledgers and logistics that ends up setting Cadet Vanto’s life on a radically different path. Quickly identifying the script on the encampment’s equipment crates as being a variant of Sy Bisti, an obscure Unknown Regions trade language, Eli is assigned to serve as translator and aide to Thrawn – an assignment which, somewhat to Eli’s dismay, ends up taking the place of his preferred vocation as a supply officer.

This sets up a very enjoyable character dynamic between Thrawn and Eli Vanto. Quickly assessing Eli and noting untapped potential within him, Thrawn sees to it that the young cadet remains at his side as he manipulates his way up the Imperial military ladder, quietly mentoring Eli in Thrawn’s own style of observation and deduction. The result is something akin to Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, as young Eli accompanies Thrawn on a variety of investigations into smuggling operations and piracy rings. It’s choices like this on Zahn’s part that add heretofore unseen depth to Thrawn in a fun and vaguely familiar way.

We also get to witness some of Thrawn’s more familiar characteristics as he closely examines the body language and facial cues of those with whom he interacts, turning each conversation into a chess game that only he himself is consciously playing. To this end, Zahn incorporates Thrawn’s own thoughts into the text, set in italic type and primarily focusing on the details he notices about people’s physiological and conversational responses in order to provide the reader with context for each “move” that Thrawn makes.

And, in true Holmes/Watson fashion, Thrawn often goes over a given conversation or bit of investigation after the fact with Eli, using the young cadet (who is promoted to Ensign after completing his studies alongside of Thrawn at the Royal Imperial Academy) as a sounding board while also guiding him through the deductive process. Over the course of the novel, we see Eli growing into his role, honing his investigation skills and realizing the value that his background in supply and shipping brings to the table as he begins to develop an ability to glean subtle and valuable information from shipping records in a similar way to what Thrawn does with his adversaries’ art and culture.

Zahn even gives Thrawn a “Moriarty” of sorts – a shadowy insurgent leader known simply as Nightswan. As Thrawn examines patterns and common threads between the various smuggling and piracy operations he breaks up, the name Nightswan begins to crop up and Thrawn realizes that this Nightswan is not only pulling the strings behind the scenes of these seemingly unrelated underworld groups, but that this person must also be doing so in support of an agenda of his or her own.

Although that ulterior agenda is unclear, Thrawn begins to form the impression that it may well be connected to spiking prices of and increased underworld interest in doonium, a rare, incredibly strong metal ore used in starship production.  The sheer amount of doonium that continues to go missing, particularly from Imperial supplies, leads Thrawn to suspect that it must be being diverted to a particularly large and secret weapons development project – and given the pre-OT timeframe in which the novel is set, I think we all can guess what that project must inevitably turn out to be.

At the same time that we get to see Thrawn and Ensign Vanto engaging in detective work, we are also treated to a glimpse into life in the Imperial Navy and the politically charged atmosphere through which Thrawn makes his ascent from Lieutenant to Grand Admiral, with Eli Vanto advising him along the way. In this respect, Zahn adds a dash of the dynamic between Captain Jack Aubrey and ship’s surgeon Stephen Maturin from Patrick O’Brian’s series of nautical historical novels. It’s no more a direct lift from the O’Brian books than the investigative angle is from the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, of course. But it does help to ground Thrawn’s story in familiar, fertile literary territory.

I found it fascinating to watch Thrawn’s single-minded pursuit of Nightswan and the doonium connection play out over the course of the novel, especially the way his apparent obsession draws criticism from his superior officers all along the way. However, Thrawn’s results are so impressive that he continues not just to evade courts martial, but calculates and exploits the reactions of his superiors as a path to advancement. It’s a new and compelling take on classic Thrawn that I suspect a lot of you will enjoy as much as I did.