Return Of The Jedi – James Kahn, 1983 ★★

Back when We Thought it Was Over

Funny all the crazy things we believed in back in 1983: imminent nuclear holocaust, supply-side economics, Hitler’s diary, and the Star Wars franchise coming to an end after just three films.

Return Of The Jedi was not the end, or even the end of the beginning; later Star Wars movies have been set chronologically both before and after this. But Jedi does conclude the original story arc about a farm boy who discovers himself to be the son of an evil galactic overlord, and how he and his friends restore good to the universe.

As a movie, it’s widely regarded as the weakest of the original trilogy, but it does something no other Star Wars film ever attempted by wrapping everything up.

Unfortunately, it’s a clumsy attempt that in book form suffers even more from lack of cohesion and special effects.

“So what I told you was true…from a certain point of view.”

“A certain point of view!” Luke rasped derisively. He felt betrayed – by life more than anything else, though only poor Ben was available to take the brunt of his conflict.

“Luke,” Ben spoke gently, “you’re going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our point of view.”

Luke (Mark Hamill) makes his entrance at Jabba's palace in Return Of The Jedi. The movie character is as muted as his wardrobe, something that carries over to the novel tie-in. Image from https://www.polygon.com/star-wars/2020/12/18/22188599/skywalker-after-return-of-the-jedi-star-wars-mandalorian-timeline.

Like the tie-in for The Empire Strikes Back before it and Star Wars before that, this sticks pretty close to the screen story. Where there are changes in the book, they are found almost entirely in the form of scenes that were in the shooting script but cut from the final print.

For example, the opening scene of hero Luke Skywalker is not him walking into Jabba the Hutt’s palace to rescue his carbonized friend Han Solo, but off on his own, building himself a new lightsaber. We watch lead villain Darth Vader walk past some anxious courtiers, sneering beneath his breath mask at their oily insignificance. More detail is offered for the simultaneous end-battles of the story, one taking place on a forest moon called Endor and the other in space where the latest version of the Death Star is attacked in mid-construction.

If you come into this novel fresh, without having seen the movie first, you are really missing out on the better part of the experience, something I say as the mildest of admirers regarding Return Of The Jedi the movie. If you come into this novel having seen the movie and wanting more, you may savor a stray detail or two, but won’t get anything immersive.

Author James Kahn is serving up the meat-and-potatoes part of the narrative, with an occasional side trip into the mind of a key participant. Most of these mind melds are fairly banal, especially when we get to a love story between Han and Princess Leia, mawkishly rendered here to make up for the shrugged-off way it is handled in the movie:

She looked at him a long moment, her blinded love – she traveled light years to find him, risked her life, lost hard-won time needed solely by the Rebellion, time she couldn’t really afford to throw away on personal quests and private desires…but she loved him.

Leia (Carrie Fisher) and Han (Harrison Ford) on Endor. Han's character is largely passive in both movie and tie-in, though the book makes an effort at developing the couple's burgeoning chemistry. Image from https://nerdist.com/article/13-best-han-solo-princess-general-leia-moments-star-wars/. 

Attempts at phonetically spelling out the words of various non-human characters, such as the beeps and whistles of the ever-loyal droid Artoo-Detoo, makes it appear Kahn got his fingers stuck in the typewriter, while his prose often comes off alternately sterile and overbaked:

“Luke stepped aside – with perfect timing, like a master matador facing a rocket-powered bull – and chopped off the bike’s steering vanes with a single mighty slash of his lightsaber”... “But these trees. They were like mighty exclamation points, announcing their preeminence. They were here!”... “The pitch of the battle augmented another notch…”

Kahn’s approach starts out fairly creative. He explores what Han was experiencing while locked inside a block of carbonite or how Vader views the lighter side of the Force: “...the sickening, weakly side of the Force, that had to beg for everything it received.” Attention is given to how the normally put-upon See-Threepio, Artoo’s companion from the opening moments of the first film, enjoys a rare moment of power while his friends are held captive, and it is good:

“I’m rather embarrassed, Captain Solo, but it appears you are to be the main course at a banquet in my honor. He is quite offended that I should suggest otherwise.”

Author James Kahn. According to his website bio, https://thatjameskahn.com/about/, he got the assignment for Return Of The Jedi based on his work on another film novelization, for Poltergeist, the year before. Image from https://www.fanthatracks.com/news/disney-settle-royalty-arrears-with-james-kahn/.

But if Kahn wanted to give the story anything more in the way of a personal spin or creative investment, he couldn’t – this was someone else’s multi-million-dollar baby. Like the novel tie-in for Empire Strikes Back, and unlike the quirkier novelization for the original Star Wars, this is a by-the-numbers effort, and not that gripping, especially since this was not that great a story to begin with.

I do like it better than the novelization for The Empire Strikes Back, but that isn’t saying much. Kahn does inject some fun back into the story, at least for a while, and I appreciated his efforts, to the point of flashing on how the movie first struck me all those years ago, when I was young and could be made to feel younger still.

But when I read it now, I wonder how I was so taken in. About half the main characters in this book, specifically Han, Lando Calrissian, Chewbacca, and the droids, get next to nothing to do here, while Leia’s story arc is wrapped up with that of Luke’s in a manner both illogical and gratuitous.

You’d think a Sith Lord with all those Force powers would pick up on Leia’s hidden identity while he was torturing her back on the original Death Star, no?

Going back to the Death Star idea for Return Of The Jedi is criticized by many, but I found the scenes set there, like this visit from Emperor Palpatine, to be highlights in the film. Kahn makes them work in the book, too. Image from https://www.starwars.com/news/death-star-ii-personnel-and-imperial-human-resources.

One new character is introduced cleverly, Imperial Admiral Jerjerrod (“Hurry was not in Jerjerrod, for hurry implied a wanting to be elsewhere, and he was a man who distinctively was exactly where he wanted to be.”) Also re-introduced in this book, after having appeared far less memorably in the Star Wars tie-in (but not the movie), is Jabba the Hutt, whom Kahn presents with marvelously descriptive good humor:

He had no hair – it had fallen out from a combination of diseases. He had no legs – his trunk simply tapered gradually to a long, plump snake-tail that stretched along the length of the platform like a tube of yeasty dough. His lipless mouth was wide, almost ear to ear, and he drooled continuously. He was quite thoroughly disgusting.

But Jabba is a character without much of a point; he is there to set up an early conflict that does little else but allow Luke to strut his new Jedi powers. George Lucas’s screenplay (written with Lawrence Kasdan) is much too gimmicky; Kahn’s novel is stuck on the same path.

Say what I might about his awkward gambling and bullfighting similes, Kahn does try to give the story life – but perhaps considering how Return Of The Jedi is a weaker story, the result is predictable.

Jabba the Hutt's desire to keep Han a prisoner instead of selling him to the Rebellion for some easy cash was a plot hole I never considered when watching the film. Perhaps I was distracted somehow. Image from https://www.pinterest.com/pin/333759022365492120/.

There’s not much you can make of a character-redemption story where the entire redemption is crammed into the last ten pages, a lengthy battle that consists of some old weirdo cackling while an endless parade of star fighters blow up, or another battle that features Beanie Babies besting an armored legion of Stormtroopers.

Rest assured the woodland-inhabiting Ewoks have right on their side. In the book, Leia rallies them to the Rebel cause with the groaner line: “Do it because of the trees.”

Kahn seems unhappy about the Ewok part of his assignment. Who can blame him? Their load-bearing placement in the plotline renders the rest of the movie quite silly, not to mention a blatant merch grab. Kahn even inserts a dig about Leia recalling dolls she played with as a girl as she ponders the possibility of “being skewered by a teddy bear.”

Kahn retreats into decent-if-lengthy descriptions regarding the pastoral beauty of the Ewoks’ surroundings on Endor:

She was struck, suddenly, not by the smallness of the Ewok who guided her, but by her own smallness next to these trees. They were ten thousand years old, some of them, and tall beyond sight. They were temples to the life-force she championed; they reached out to the rest of the universe. She felt herself part of their greatness, but also dwarfed by it.

Give Kahn some credit: He knew better than try to recreate this golden moment from the movie. Image from https://giphy.com/gifs/starwars-star-wars-han-solo-xT1R9ZWvo3Dd9njq8M

The main disappointment for me reading Return Of The Jedi is the handling of Han Solo, the smuggler who by now has committed himself fully to supporting the Rebellion. His blandness in the movie can be ascribed to actor Harrison Ford, who didn’t want to be on the set in the first place and let it impact his performance, but reading the book is to understand the cause of Ford’s dissatisfaction. His character gets nothing to do other than tell Leia he loves her, too.

Ultimately, the film works best when it focuses on the bad guys. The book does, too:

Emperor. It had a certain ring to it. The Republic had crumbled, the Empire was resplendent with its own fires, and would always be so – for the Emperor knew what others refused to believe: the dark forces were the strongest.

You get Emperor Palpatine’s point reading this novel. The more Kahn pushes the virtues of the Rebellion and the lighter side of the Force, the more boring, trite, and shrill his narrative voice becomes. He doesn’t believe a bit of it, and neither did I while reading it. Return Of The Jedi is pleasant fare, but hollow.