Dune Messiah

Dune Messiah is a fascinating sequel that perfectly evolves the thematic discussion of the first book, framing its protagonist as a complicated tyrant, whose conflicting characteristics make him both terrifying and tragic. It’s a novel that falters only in its very brief length, with a climax that comes too soon, leaving some of the important characters underdeveloped.

The epigraph that opens the book is fascinating. It asks us to see the main character, the Emperor Paul Muad’Dib, as a human being, disregarding his special powers and abilities. It’s urging us to strip him of whatever makes him supernatural, a character belonging to the realm of fantasy, and ground him in reality, treating him not as a figure of myth but as a real person:

“Such a rich store of myths enfolds Paul Muad’Dib, the Mentat Emperor, and his sister, Alia, it is difficult to see the real persons behind these veils. But there were, after all, a man born Paul Atreides and a woman born Alia. Their flesh was subject to space and time. And even though their oracular powers placed them beyond the usual limits of time and space, they came from real stock. They experienced real events which left real traces upon a real universe.”

What the epigraph is asking of us is the willingness to frame the story with an allegorical lens, projecting Paul’s journey into the real world, seeing him as one of us. In other words, the book basically starts by saying, “What follows is a warning:” “To understand them, it must be seen that their catastrophe was the catastrophe of all mankind. This work is dedicated, then, not to Muad’Dib or his sister, but to their heirs – to all of us.”

The intro also establishes that, much like the first book, we are reading a tragedy, an unavoidable catastrophe. It details future events in the book but paints them as belonging to the past, so that there’s no doubt that they will indeed transpire. The novel’s structure is that of a prophecy disguised as history, the future – what we will read – framed as the past – what has already happened. It lays out the tragedy of future events, giving them a powerful force: when Paul and the other characters struggle with their visions of the future, considering them as unavoidable as destiny, we buy their powerlessness because we already know those future events to be true.

The first chapter has Empress Irulan, Paul’s wife, plotting his downfall with her mentor (a Reverend Mother of the Bene Gesserit), a Face Dancer (a shapeshifter named Scytale), and a Guild Navigator (a bizarre mutated human that lives in a spice tank and is able to disrupt Paul’s prescience). They reveal how their scheme revolves around Paul’s dead friend, Duncan Idaho: they have acquired the warrior’s body and used its flesh to create a golem, who retains just a flicker of the body’s memories. They call him Hayt, the ghola, and gift him to Paul.

The Face Dancer, Scytale, is the main antagonist in the book, and we watch this scene from his perspective. His cleverness is conveyed through Scytale perceiving hidden motivations and feelings: his ability to accurately read everyone in the room builds him as a dangerous adversary to Paul, especially when we see that he’s capable of outsmarting even the Reverend Mother. He also perfectly understands the issue with the Fremen: “They’re not mad. They’re trained to believe, not to know. Belief can be manipulated. Only knowledge is dangerous.” Scytale treats faith as a weakness and one that he intends to exploit: those who profess it often confuse it with knowledge – they don’t believe their God exists, they know – and it’s this certainty that makes them both vulnerable and dangerous.

The fierceness of this certainty is what haunts Paul the most, making him judge and fear the beliefs of his own people. When we move to Paul, he’s been living as Emperor for twelve years, and we find a powerful man who possesses the gift of prophecy, of vision, of prescience, and yet still has to wonder what the love of his life sees when she looks at him. Chani is not his wife – that’s Irulan, the conspirator – and she’s clearly troubled by the situation: “I have no place,” she says to Paul when he’s probing if she really fears that Irulan has any chance of replacing her.

Paul loves Chani, as this passage makes it clear, associating her figure with a nostalgic warmth and a sense of comfort: “He closed his eyes, and Chani came into his memories as a girl once more – veiled in springtime, singing, waking from sleep beside him – so perfect that the very vision of her consumed him.” And yet this vision of love is interrupted by another one, much more terrible: “For a moment, his nostrils tasted the smoke of a devastated future and the voice of another kind of vision commanding him to disengage.” We can see by this interruption how Paul’s terrible purpose – his status as a Messiah – and his love for Chani are clashing with each other, fighting for space.

Paul regrets his decisions and even wonders if they were decisions at all, or if he was just a puppet moving according to the strings of fate, a prospect both terrifying and compelling, as it would constrain his free will but also remove from him any responsibility for his actions. Paul often thinks how, even though he can see many possible futures, he doesn’t really have a choice in the matter, for there’s either only one path to tread or none at all: “There are problems in this world for which there are no answers,” Paul says. “Nothing. Nothing can be done.”

His enemies’ plan is precisely to take advantage of this lack of choice. When he sees the golem made in the image of Duncan Idaho, the “ghola” named Hayt, Paul immediately senses the trap but accepts it anyway, feeling constricted by the situation: “The Tleilaxu name spoke of peril. Paul felt himself tempted to reject the gift. Even as he felt the temptation, he knew he couldn’t choose that way. This flesh made demands of House Atreides – a fact the enemy knew well.”

He argues with Chani that he doesn’t have control even over his own jihad, the holy war perpetrated in his name. He claims that the reason he can’t put a stop to it is because religious warfare is fought over images and not people, which means that his actual will matters less to his army than the will they project over him. Scytale defines religion as a mental epidemic that is overwhelmingly contagious. And in Paul’s case, it is even worse, since he doesn’t have a legion of fanatics, it’s the legions that have him. Dune Messiah is a novel much more interested in discussing ideas than presenting action sequences and, through Paul’s journey, it articulates that the individual will of a Messiah is irrelevant: his words can be conveniently ignored or disingenuously twisted because the thing that matters the most to the people is the intoxicating effect his image has over them: it’s the righteousness, the feeling of moral superiority that it brings to those that embrace it.

Paul’s characterization is complex as he is himself a deadly paradox, both Atreides and Harkonnen, both liberator and tyrant, hero and villain. He scares both his fiercest enemies and his most loyal friends. On the one hand, he is succeeding in revitalizing Arrakis, in bringing water to the people, in building gardens when there was only scorching sand before. But on the other hand, he has accomplished all that by being the figurehead of a galactic jihad.

He blames his people for having won the image of a tyrant, but his speeches often perfectly embody the viewpoint of one. When someone in his council suggests writing a Constitution for Arrakis, Paul makes a speech that is brilliant in its contradictions, as it reinforces his voice as the only source of power in Arrakis at the same time that it tries to paint it as flawed:

“Constitutions become the ultimate tyranny,” Paul said. “They’re organized power on such a scale as to be overwhelming. The constitution is social power mobilized and it has no conscience. It can crush the highest and the lowest, removing all dignity and individuality. It has an unstable balance point and no limitations. I, however, have limitations. In my desire to provide an ultimate protection for my people, I forbid a constitution.”

Considering the initial epigraph urges us to project Paul’s journey into our reality, it doesn’t come as a surprise the moment when Paul himself does exactly that. There’s a scene where he compares himself directly with Genghis Khan and Hitler, comparing both the language used in their speeches and the number of deaths caused in their name. And Paul believes himself to be the clear winner: “Statistics: at a conservative estimate, I’ve killed sixty-one billion, sterilized ninety planets, forty religions.”

It’s Paul to blame for this genocide or it is his people? This is a question that lies at the heart of Dune Messiah, haunting its characters. “People are subordinate to government, but the ruled influence the rulers. Did the ruled have any concept, he wondered, of what they had helped create here,” Hayt thinks, believing that a ruler is a mirror that reflects their people, that to witness a ruler’s many mistakes is to catch a glimpse of that people’s fatal flaws.

Hayt’s eyes are made of metal, which is appropriate, as it reinforces his cryptic nature. Throughout the book, he is a sphynx, a monstrous creature that is always telling the truth but never offering straight answers. He’s a cypher even to himself. Much like Paul, he’s struggling to define his own identity. When he appears on a balcony next to Paul at night, Paul asks him if he is Duncan or Hayt, and the ghola answers, “Which one would my lord prefer?”

It’s precisely the relationship between Hayt and Paul’s sister, Alia, that makes one of the book’s main problems, as it is severely underdeveloped. Alia herself is the major victim of the novel’s brevity, remaining even more inscrutable than Hayt, as we gain access to her point of view very briefly. There’s a sexual tension between Alia and Hayt (and even between Alia and Paul in certain scenes), which becomes even more complicated when we consider that Alia has all the memories of her mother. It’s a fascinating and complex situation that should have warranted more pages to develop it. By the same token, because we don’t see much more of Irulan’s perspective after the first chapter, her feelings and decision after the climax all feel a bit random.

“Ideas are most to be feared when they become actions,” Paul says to Hayt. Dune Messiah is about the process that makes faith lead to persecution, showing it evolve into religion, and through the collective rage of the people, escalate into a holy war. “Religion, too, is a weapon. What manner of weapon is religion when it becomes the government?” Paul’s adversary asks him. Above all else, then, Dune Messiah is a warning.

April 28, 2024.