Dune Messiah
Year: 1969
Author: Frank Herbert
Publsher: Putnam Publishing
Pages: 256
Published: 29/06/22
Author: Frank Herbert
Publsher: Putnam Publishing
Pages: 256
Published: 29/06/22
When I read Frank Herbert’s Dune earlier this year after being inspired to do so by Denis Villeneuve’s 2021 film adaptation, I was left underwhelmed to say the least. Whilst I loved the amount of depth that Herbert put into the ecology of the planet Arrakis, the actual story itself was usually a bitter pill to swallow thanks to excessively complicated language, meandering sentence structure, and characters that weren’t particularly interesting. The lack of a definitive ending also rubbed me up the wrong way, but shortly after finishing the book I made the decision to try another tour of Arrakis with Dune’s sequel, Dune Messiah. Now on the other side of that ordeal, I can certainly say I won’t be returning again.
Twelve years after Paul ‘Muad’Dib’ Atreides defeated House Harkonnen and overthrew the Galactic Emperor, his rule brought with it the status of Messiah among the Fremen people. This unleashed a holy war throughout the universe spanning thousands of planets and leading to the deaths of over sixty billion people. Unable to control this kind of power, the Bene Gesserit, the Spacing Guild, and the Bene Tleilaxu conspire to dethrone Paul and have his heir be produced by Princess Irulan, daughter of the former Emperor. Paul meanwhile desires his Fremen wife, Chani, to bear his child, though she has been unable to conceive.
In an attempt to defame Paul in front of the Fremen, the Tleliaxu send in a ‘Ghola’ that Paul believes to be the resurrected body of his former friend and mentor Duncan Idaho. Despite accepting the Ghola in as the former Idaho, Paul understands that this will inevitably lead to his downfall.
That’s probably a really awful summary of what Dune Messiah is about, but I want to clarify that I genuinely tried my best but I have absolutely no idea what the story of this book was actually about. Herbert has crafted a novel about an omniscient ruler of the universe in Paul who uses his powers to do, well, nothing really. There are a lot of characters in this book who can see through time and space to determine what course of action they would like to take, Paul and his sister Alia being just two…but everyone’s so afraid of doing anything that they just decide to do nothing, and it really sucks.
Thankfully Dune Messiah is relatively short, coming in at just under three hundred pages (for the edition I read), but it was some of the longest and nonsensical three hundred pages I’ve ever read in my life. The first hundred pages or so set up the story…sort of. We get the outline of the plan to dethrone Paul and the re-introduction of Duncan, as well as an extremely brief and unsatisfying overview of what happened in the twelve years between Dune and Messiah. The next hundred pages I simply cannot recall any information from, I do not know what happened here other than a tangled mess of sentences that served only to contradict themselves. The final hundred pages then were a rushed and muddled mess of events that once again provided an ending with no resolution and no explanation for what just transpired.
I don’t really know how to review something I have failed to understand this much, but I can state without a doubt in my mind that within the first few pages of Messiah, Herbert introduces multiple brand-new factions and technologies that were not present in the original Dune, but does not explain who any of these people are or what this technology is capable of doing. It’s almost like he expects readers to just understand what he sees in his mind without putting that onto the page.
The characters are just as bad as before, if not worse. Paul is hardly a character anymore; he just spouts paradoxical rhetoric and seems blissfully content with his Empire crumbling around him. Alia was never a good character and now she’s made even worse because all she seems to care about now is thinking that Duncan’s a hottie…yes, even omniscient near godlike beings that just so happen to be women must drop everything to get laid and go all doe eyed over a muscular man. Duncan can’t decide what character he even is half the time, which is supposed to be the intrigue to his story, but it doesn’t work very well. Chani is literally just there to be baby vessel. I liked Irulan, but she wasn’t in the book much. Then there’s a whole host of supporting characters that make little to no sense.
Dune Messiah is one of the biggest wastes of time I’ve ever forced myself to endure. I hated almost every moment I read the book and come the final pages I was once again scorned by Herbert’s inability to wrap a story up. I hated it, and it is primarily down to the fact that I couldn’t understand it. But even in comparison to the original novel which at least tried to communicate its complex themes and mechanics to you, Messiah does not. It just dumps you in the middle of it and expects to you know what’s happening in the author’s mind. Apparently, Messiah was worthy of literary awards, but I’m pretty sure if this review had just consisted of random made up words scrawled across the page with no discernible meaning then I wouldn’t be getting hailed as a literary genius.
Twelve years after Paul ‘Muad’Dib’ Atreides defeated House Harkonnen and overthrew the Galactic Emperor, his rule brought with it the status of Messiah among the Fremen people. This unleashed a holy war throughout the universe spanning thousands of planets and leading to the deaths of over sixty billion people. Unable to control this kind of power, the Bene Gesserit, the Spacing Guild, and the Bene Tleilaxu conspire to dethrone Paul and have his heir be produced by Princess Irulan, daughter of the former Emperor. Paul meanwhile desires his Fremen wife, Chani, to bear his child, though she has been unable to conceive.
In an attempt to defame Paul in front of the Fremen, the Tleliaxu send in a ‘Ghola’ that Paul believes to be the resurrected body of his former friend and mentor Duncan Idaho. Despite accepting the Ghola in as the former Idaho, Paul understands that this will inevitably lead to his downfall.
That’s probably a really awful summary of what Dune Messiah is about, but I want to clarify that I genuinely tried my best but I have absolutely no idea what the story of this book was actually about. Herbert has crafted a novel about an omniscient ruler of the universe in Paul who uses his powers to do, well, nothing really. There are a lot of characters in this book who can see through time and space to determine what course of action they would like to take, Paul and his sister Alia being just two…but everyone’s so afraid of doing anything that they just decide to do nothing, and it really sucks.
Thankfully Dune Messiah is relatively short, coming in at just under three hundred pages (for the edition I read), but it was some of the longest and nonsensical three hundred pages I’ve ever read in my life. The first hundred pages or so set up the story…sort of. We get the outline of the plan to dethrone Paul and the re-introduction of Duncan, as well as an extremely brief and unsatisfying overview of what happened in the twelve years between Dune and Messiah. The next hundred pages I simply cannot recall any information from, I do not know what happened here other than a tangled mess of sentences that served only to contradict themselves. The final hundred pages then were a rushed and muddled mess of events that once again provided an ending with no resolution and no explanation for what just transpired.
I don’t really know how to review something I have failed to understand this much, but I can state without a doubt in my mind that within the first few pages of Messiah, Herbert introduces multiple brand-new factions and technologies that were not present in the original Dune, but does not explain who any of these people are or what this technology is capable of doing. It’s almost like he expects readers to just understand what he sees in his mind without putting that onto the page.
The characters are just as bad as before, if not worse. Paul is hardly a character anymore; he just spouts paradoxical rhetoric and seems blissfully content with his Empire crumbling around him. Alia was never a good character and now she’s made even worse because all she seems to care about now is thinking that Duncan’s a hottie…yes, even omniscient near godlike beings that just so happen to be women must drop everything to get laid and go all doe eyed over a muscular man. Duncan can’t decide what character he even is half the time, which is supposed to be the intrigue to his story, but it doesn’t work very well. Chani is literally just there to be baby vessel. I liked Irulan, but she wasn’t in the book much. Then there’s a whole host of supporting characters that make little to no sense.
Dune Messiah is one of the biggest wastes of time I’ve ever forced myself to endure. I hated almost every moment I read the book and come the final pages I was once again scorned by Herbert’s inability to wrap a story up. I hated it, and it is primarily down to the fact that I couldn’t understand it. But even in comparison to the original novel which at least tried to communicate its complex themes and mechanics to you, Messiah does not. It just dumps you in the middle of it and expects to you know what’s happening in the author’s mind. Apparently, Messiah was worthy of literary awards, but I’m pretty sure if this review had just consisted of random made up words scrawled across the page with no discernible meaning then I wouldn’t be getting hailed as a literary genius.