Hello everyone!
Welcome back to a galaxy far, far away!
I'll admit that I sometimes need to take minor breaks in between reading genres, because on occasion they can become too much. This is what happened with my interest in the Star Wars books franchise, because I had pretty much gobbled down at least four or five books in a row, and then felt like I needed a bit of a breather.
So that was what I did.
And eventually picked up the one book I was probably, almost THE most excited about.
Okay it's a toss between this one and the one about Padmé. They're pretty much my favourite characters from the entire saga.
Obi-Wan Kenobi is a character that links both the Prequel and the Original trilogies, the bridge we need to understand just what happened and how things connect. Sure the villains are also there - but it's Kenobi that a lot of people connect with the most.
So the book titled directly after him is obviously a must-read.
I had read sufficient Star Wars material up until the point I picked up Kenobi that I knew some of what to expect, at the very least to not be surprised at certain things.
Still, Kenobi opens up with an interesting scene on Tatooine where Obi-Wan walks into a bar with a baby and ends up in a bar fight. It could be the beginning of a joke, but it really isn't, seeing as trouble seems to follow this guy everywhere! He does successfully deliver Luke to the Lars family, and then comes the difficult thing: how to remain close enough to the child to watch over him without being found out.
At this point in time, he doesn't know Anakin has survived the ordeal on Mustafar and become Darth Vader, although he does know that the Jedi have been practically wiped out, another burden on his shoulders.
But that's neither here nor there in this particular installment as it centers mostly around the settlers he gets to know and somehow ends up thrust into their problematic midst, really.
They have this interesting thing, a local militia so to speak, or the Call, that they use whenever Tusken raiders come a-hooting. If you remember, these are the rag-wrapped creatures that live in the desert, look like a cross between a mummy and a robot, and hate anything that isn't wrapped up as they are. A lot of the book is told from the perspective of a Tusken war leader, A'Yark, and it takes until the actual revelation in the book to connect the dots together for this particular Tusken.
Anyway, "Ben" arrives, trying to lay low and not get in the way, but honestly, the first time he popped up there was a bar fight, so any subsequent times he's going to show his face are bound to be interesting, as well.
The settlers are curious, because he's a new face, obviously, the local leader of the Call, Orrin, wants him to pay up for protection, and the mercantile owner Annilee seems to have fallen for Ben's charms (who wouldn't, really?).
Not only this, but the settlers have their own problems, with the Tuskens, with themselves, with their families (Annie has two children, a daughter who wants attention and a son who wants to get off Tatooine or at least do something worthwhile with his time, which is how he ends up working with Orrin). Anyway, Ben saved Annie's daughter during a time when her riding animal goes cray-cray, and then after that he sort of makes a few more appearances to the mercantile, only to one time incite a near-riot, and the other time the Tuskens actually attack the location.
Why?
Because they assume, wrongly, that Annie is an 'airwalker' after witnessing some Force-connected feats our dear Ben employs to rescue her in the desert, and as there was one of those who at one point came to join them and lead them, they believe Annie should join them, as well.
They realize the error of that one when Ben has to employ the Force again (not so that anyone from the settlement can figure it out, mind you) and then want BEN to tag along.
Ben is busy trying to employ the Jedi ways of negotiation while the settlers are busy retaliating and shooting any Tusken they can herd together into a gorge, at which point it's revealed A'Yark is actually a female, not a male, who usually lead the raiding groups.
Female empowerment, FTW!
Anyway, Ben attempts to avoid Annie and the mercantile from then on, but he sort of gets drawn into an outing to Mos Espa (a town we know well), where he ends up having to save Orrin from Jabba the Hutt's minions, and things also come to a violent head when he intervenes during a supposed "Tusken" attack on a farmstead, which turns out to be false.
Ben rescues Jabe, Annie's son whom Orrin just leaves behind, first from A'Yark and then from his mother's wrath, and explains to Annie that Orrin is heavily in debt, and the reason he wants to marry her so desperately is to put the store up as collateral before Jabba gets to him. Also, he's been staging Tusken attacks to ensure money kept on pouring into the Call funding, on top of everything else.
And of course Orrin wants to now take out Ben, inciting the people to do the same thing, but Ben has negotiated a deal with the Tuskens and manages to handle the problem, though Annie doesn't make it any easier when she calls down the Hutt's minions on Orrin as well.
All's well that ends well, however, as Ben defeats a desert dragon, Orrin ends up taken by the Tuskens and becoming one of them to work with the water tower they stole so they can have water, and Annie and her children sell the mercantile, since popular sentiment seems to have turned against them.
"Ben" pulls strings to get Annie into a university course on Naboo (or was it Alderaan? I know the course was on Alderaan, but it ran out of Naboo), and sends her and the children on their way, sadly on their own contrary to what she had thought would happen.
Sorry, Annie girl, but Ben's got things to do, and you ain't one of 'em.
After as much tumult and chaos throughout the book wherever Obi-Wan went (to the point where he literally suggested he was never moving from his desert house again, caring for his eopie and her baby instead), he now finally knows exactly how he's going to go about making sure Luke is protected - and he still needs to atone, anyway.
(He also needs to get better at meditation since he can't reach his old master Qui-Gon, who had become one with the Force, and dearly wants to communicate with him, but Qui-Gon is having none of it.)
After all, it's only in this book, through A'Yark, that Obi-Wan learns what frightened the Tuskens so badly some years before his landing with Luke, so much that they gave up raiding for a while. A bipedal being killed a mighty war band - and the women and children too. And finally, Obi-Wan connects the dots of what Padmé DIDN'T tell him about the jaunt to Tatooine to rescue Anakin's mother, realizing that the fall to the Dark side had begun long before the Jedi originally thought.
But through it all, mostly through his meditations, Obi-Wan is revealed as a deeply tragic and hurting figure, desperately sad over the loss of his apprentice (at this point thought dead), and more so mourning the loss of his family, the Jedi. In a lot of aspects, the Jedi were like a SEAL Team unit - what does it mean to be a SEAL alone? Not much, as they're trained against the kind of thing, and work in pairs or groups.
Similar as the Jedi, really. So what does it mean to be a Jedi alone, without even a little weird green uncle to guide you?
By the end of the book, which reads like a Western, Ben seems to have found a way to cope and not draw attention to himself anymore, slowly fading into the desert sands as the Crazy Old Ben people meet in A New Hope.
And with that, Obi-Wan Kenobi fades into legend.
xx
*images not mine
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