Book Review: The Living Force

What if…the members of the Jedi Council went on a field trip together? A bit simply put perhaps, but that’s the central premise behind John Jackson Miller’s The Living Force, which follows the entirety of the Jedi Council as they head to Kwenn, where an old Jedi Outpost is set to be decommissioned, on a mission of goodwill to the greater galaxy. 

Besides the obvious wildness of having the entire Jedi council present and playing an active role in the story, the most interesting aspect of the novel is what Miller chooses to do with the Jedi council, and the questions he chooses to tackle by their very presence. By the time we get to The Phantom Menace, the Council is very much in a state of removal from the galaxy at large. They ponder questions of the larger force, and tackle the issues brought to them by the Republic, but the connection they have with the broader galaxy is gone. The High Republic days of Jedi outposts, exploration, and living and training out among the greater galaxy are no more — or rare — as the interests of the Order become increasingly entwined with those of the Republic. If the High Republic was the precedent, then The Living Force is the payoff for that sort of thinking. 

All this is to say that for all the Jedi Council are our protagonists, we aren’t necessarily rooting for them, as we can see this sort of philosophical, detached mentality has already begun to take over the older members, and we see that the institution as a whole is starting to buckle under the weight of its own presumed grandeur. Even when they do make an attempt to connect with the locals on Kwenn, and try to resolve their problems, as Qui-Gon Jinn suggested they do, its clear many of them have forgotten what it even means to help on such a fundamental level. It’s also clear, with the way a young Obi-Wan Kenobi struggles with the same thing very early on, that this level of care and outreach for the larger galaxy is something they don’t even really teach or emphasize anymore. 

That’s not to imply that the council are heartless or anything, far from it. This is still a novel, and there is still a journey for them to all go on, but what The Living Force does best, perhaps, is tackle the question of the role of the Jedi in the galaxy in so direct a way that it becomes startlingly clear to the reader how and why the Order became too big to fail.

The Living Force hits shelves on April 9. Special thank you to Random House Worlds for the advance copy for review purposes.