Book Review: Dune Messiah
The fantastic - and quite frankly, weird - second book in Frank Herbert’s Dune saga; a thought-provoking epilogue to the first book.
When I first read Dune, I knew I wanted to continue to read more in the series. I really enjoyed the first and wrote a review to that effect here. My appreciation for the book only deepened when I finally got a chance to see Denis Villeneuve’s masterful film adaptation of its first half, and I am absolutely hyped for the next installment. Meanwhile, I will be sporadically reading my way through the rest of Frank Herbert’s six-part series. I picked up Dune Messiah by chance for the princely sum of 50 pence in a used bookshop in a National Trust property my wife and I visited during the summer last year. As you can see from the picture, it’s an old copy with the original cover from 1969, and it’s rather charming. The only problem is that it doesn’t match my 50th anniversary Dune cover, which is part of a cover set for all six. At some point I think I’ll pick up a newer copy of Messiah to match. Anyway, let’s get into the review:
Blurb
Twelve years after his victory over House Harkonnen, Paul Atreides rules as emperor from the desert planet Arrakis - but his victory has had profound consequences. War has been brought to the entire known universe, and billions have already perished. Despite having become the most powerful emperor known to history, Paul is powerless to bring an end to the fighting.
While former allies conspire to dethrone Paul and even his own consort acts against him, Paul accepts a gift from the Tleilaxu, a guild of genetic manipulators, hoping to find a single spark of peace and friendship amidst the betrayal and chaos. But this act undermines Paul's support from the Fremen, his own people. The Fremen are the true source of Paul's power; losing them is the one thing that could truly topple his empire.
As matters escalate, Paul will be forced to chose between his throne, his wife, his people and his future - and the future of the entire universe.
Review
Dune Messiah is a much shorter book than Dune - about a third of the length, in fact. One thing that struck me immediately is that there’s more time here to spend getting invested in the characters. Similarly to the first book, Messiah is written in the third person omniscient style and so there’s a lot of head-hopping, but it’s again handled exceptionally well (you’re never really confused about whose POV you’re in). I think it helps that there’s fewer major characters at play in this one, and the characters that are here are given a lot of depth. The only character complaint I have is for Stilgar: I may be misremembering his personality from the first book, but he seemed… less. Perhaps that was purposeful; that he’s lost something of his Fremen self over the last twelve years of Paul’s jihad. Here he seems more like a lapdog than a leader. If it was done intentionally then that’s fine, zero complaints - it just felt sad to me.
Moving onto the plot. The first book ended pretty abruptly for its build-up, and Messiah rectifies this perfectly. The sequel acts very much like an extended epilogue and we get to see where Paul’s journey and prescient powers have led him. Where many people have misinterpreted Paul as a hero in Dune despite plenty of signs to the contrary, we truly get to see in Messiah exactly how much he is not. Over sixty billion dead and whole worlds sterilised in his violent conquest of the galaxy; his reign as despotic god-emperor from Arrakis; all the things his visions in the first book warned him of, and his melancholic fatalism over not being able to change anything. We also get to the see the profound effect this has had on his family - his wife Chani, his sister Alia, Stilgar, Duncan Idaho… It’s pretty depressing when you think about it. Speaking of Duncan, I won’t say much, but I think his character was handled amazingly and I cannot wait to see Villeneuve tackle Messiah just to see Jason Momoa take on this character work.
Both Frank Herbert’s Dune and Isaac Asimov’s Foundation deal with the concept of galactic empires and the use of religion for control within that framework. They both deal with stories that happen tens of thousands of years in the future. They both took inspiration from the fall of the Roman Empire, and I believe both Herbert and Asimov used the same sources for their research. However, in my opinion, Frank Herbert handled it a lot better. Sure, it’s softer sci-fi with Paul having been given spice-induced prescient powers that certainly help him be perceived as a god, but that does it a disservice, because there’s also the strong undercurrent of centuries of religious conditioning of the Fremen by the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood that Paul is able to use to this end. By contrast, I didn’t find the Foundation’s use of religion in controlling the planets of the Periphery to be particularly convincing, as it was mostly based on people worshipping science, and it didn’t take very long.
There are a few exceptionally weird parts in Dune Messiah as well, but I’ve since been told the series does get even weirder from here on, so I think I’ll withhold comment on that until I’ve read further in!
In terms of worldbuilding, even though the story almost entirely takes place on Arrakis, we get to see a lot more of the universe that Herbert has built. We get to see the Tleilaxu - their Face Dancers and Gholas - and are treated in depth to their motivations; we get to see more of what has become of the Bene Gesserit, and we get our first proper look at a Guild Steersman/Navigator.
A couple of very mild negatives: I’m still not a great lover of Herbert’s tendency to leave out “and” in his prose. It always strikes me as odd. Also, as much as he’s a great writer when it comes to his worldbuilding, political intrigue, and creating distinctive characters with complex motivations… he’s not that great at action on a scale larger than a one-on-one fight. There’s a scene in the book in which something happens that affects a lot of people in the vicinity and I had to read it through more than a couple of times to understand what was happening. By contrast, later on in the book there’s a particularly weird scene involving action between two individual characters from a very odd viewpoint, and it was handled brilliantly. So I really think the scale of the action and how many people are involved determines how well Herbert writes it.
Also, maybe this is just me being really dense (it probably is), but some of the more vague metaphorical imagery kind of went over my head. I mean the vast majority of it was fine to understand (and there’s a LOT of it in here), but there were one or two things - especially later in the book - that had me scratching my head.
Overall, though. Dune Messiah is excellent. I think I enjoyed it more than Dune, actually. It gives much-needed closure, context and completion to the first book. Honestly, if you’re thinking of reading Dune (and you should), then Messiah is absolutely required afterwards. The two go hand in hand, even if this is as far as you ever get in the series, you can’t really read Dune without Dune Messiah.
