Dune

*This review contains spoilers*

Written by Frank Herbert and published in 1965, Dune is a complex sci-fi novel that is full of interesting characters and challenging discussion. Its narrative excels when it comes to building a stifling, oppressive atmosphere, immersing the reader into the main characters’ paranoia, but it occasionally falters when dealing with the delivery of exposition regarding its carefully built world.

Dune’s story is structured around the feud between two noble families – the Atreides and the Harkonnens –, who fight to control the production of an important spice on the planet of Arrakis, also known as Dune. This eventually leads to the rise of a messianic figure called Muad’Dib, who will guide the desert people of Arrakis to war.

The book begins with a diegetic epigraph about the Muad’Dib, establishing him as the central figure of the narrative. The protagonist, the one who is bound to become Muad’Dib, is Paul Atreides, a duke’s son who is just fifteen years old but has been trained to become far more alert, perceptive, and wise than a normal child of his age. One night, he’s visited by an old woman who performs a test on him: Paul must put his hand inside a box and endure the relentless pain it’s going to cause him without moving an inch – otherwise she’ll puncture him with a needle full of poison and end his life. It’s a test to prove his worth – to prove that he’s indeed special – and it’s one Paul passes with flying colors.

The first chapter alone is already full of complex themes. Paul is of noble stock; he’s the progeny of a duke, and this ancestry is framed as a source of strength. Paul is special and the element that makes him so powerful appears to be his noble blood, his “better” genes: they say his training only serves to awaken his dormant abilities. Right before going through his first test, for example, the encouraging words Paul’s mother, Jessica, gives him are, “Remember that you’re a duke’s son.”

The old woman, however, quickly puts that into question, stating that her needle has a poison that will kill only “animals”, and explains the use of the word: for her, men can be divided into two groups, humans and animals, and what tells them apart is the former’s ability to have mastery over their own emotions and instincts: “You’ve heard of animals chewing off a leg to escape a trap? There’s an animal kind of trick. A human would remain in the trap, endure the pain, feigning death that he might kill the trapper and remove a threat to his kind,” she explains to Paul. Humans, then, are framed as masters of planning and self-control, which are the prime goals of the protagonist’s training.

This distinction between humans and animals is a dangerous idea, since it gives the nobility an ideology that justifies their alleged superiority while denying the common people their basic humanity – which could lead to a fascistic, tyrannical rule. “Humans must never submit to animals,” Jessica repeats to her old mentor to signal she still knows what she was trained to think. The old woman even goes on to tackle eugenics, talking about the importance of setting up certain “dominant genes” and “acceptable stock”, and, of course, about the need to separate “human stock from animal stock – for breeding purposes.” Paul gets agitated with this conversation as if he instinctively senses there’s something very wrong with it.

The Bene Gesserit, the sisterhood Jessica and her old mentor are a part of, is quickly framed under very shady lights. They are a group of women, trained in the art of manipulation and mental conditioning, that has the secret goal of controlling the political forces of that universe. Their motto is a deceptive one: “We exist only to serve,” they repeat often, but just so that they can be invited into the most powerful families and become able to direct their fate from the shadows.

On the one hand, they are all women who subvert sexist notions of gender roles, using them in their favor in a futuristic society that actually regressed to feudal ways, with noble families controlling planetary fiefs and responding to an emperor that has to constantly worry about maintaining his power: a society in which women must be glad to be remembered as wives instead of concubines. The Bene Gesserit is a group of very powerful women, who are so perceptive and self-aware that they can command people with their voice alone, persuading them to do things they otherwise wouldn’t. They can even change the properties of the things they ingest, nullifying the effects of poison, for example. Not surprisingly – being women with power – they are often called witches by those around them.

On the other hand, the Bene Gesserit believe that if they can give life to a man that is able to do what they were trained and bred to do, he would surpass them. They believe in a “male savior” figure, the Kwisatz Haderach, who, precisely because he’s a man, would be able to achieve more than them, being able to “see” things they can’t simply because of their sex. In other words, if they subvert gender roles, controlling people who believe that a woman’s role is to serve, they also believe that a man is more capable than they are – and even use eugenics to try to create this man.

The Bene Gesserit are so manipulative that they even visit strategic worlds just to implant prophecies that will be useful for them in the future, exploiting people’s faith. One of these prophecies regards the coming of a certain messiah to Arrakis: a man wise beyond his years that will help them become finally free of their torments and change the planet for the better. The protagonist’s father, the Duke Leto Atreides, as soon as he hears about the prophecy he tells Paul to make use of it if he ever needs aid.

The figure of Muad’Dib, then, becomes a controversial one. On the one hand, the prophecy regarding him was implanted in that society for the sole purpose of being exploited at a later date, and Paul is aware of that. But on the other, he seems to fit that prophecy so perfectly that it still gives him an air of supernatural authenticity that no one – even his mother – can deny.  There is an early scene in which Paul instinctively feels “something stir his terrible purpose” just by reading a Bible, for example.

There’s a great deal of discussion about fate and destiny in Dune. Paul’s father, for example, is considered by everyone around him to be a dead man walking. Jessica’s mentor talks about how his fate is sealed and there’s nothing to be done; his enemies thoroughly detail the plans for his assassination, and even his close friends seem to predict what’s going to happen – and the epigraphs, which are written by a character in the future, confirm everything. Duke Leto is going to die.

The epigraphs form a crucial element of Dune’s narrative. Even though there’s a spoiler warning at the beginning of this review, this is a difficult book to spoil, as everything that’s going to happen is quickly laid out by these epigraphs or by the characters themselves. They all expose who’s going to die, who’s going to commit a betrayal, who’s going to remain loyal: they basically reveal every major event and twist beforehand, which has several effects on the narrative.

First, it doubles down on the theme of fate. Since they reveal things that are still going to happen, they serve as little prophecies, binding those characters to a specific destiny as soon as they appear. If a chapter begins with an epigraph telling that a certain character is going to betray another or die, those characters are then robbed of their “agency”, being immediately locked to a course that will lead to said betrayal or death. The protagonist’s struggle with his role in Arrakis, with his “terrible purpose”, is above all else a fight against fate. It’s not because the prophecy about Muad’Dib is a fabrication that it is less binding. Paul was trained and “bred” to fit that role, whether he wants it or not. He wants to remain kind, but the events keep pushing him in the other direction.

This means that his transformation into the desert prophet is a sad event, and even those close to Paul become disfigured with time: the protagonist, near the end, notes how one of his friends went from being a charismatic leader to being “his creature” in the span of just a few years – and all due to the religion formed around the figure of Muad’Dib.

The prophecy was constructed by the Bene Gesserit to make Paul have the outward appearance of a white savior. It focuses on all the victories he will get and all the changes he will bring. However, his role as a prophet and leader is to transform the desert people – they, very ironically, are known as the Fremen –, into an army of religious zealots. He’s not supposed to save them, but to enslave them. He is to go to the people of Arrakis and bend them to his will; not by force, but with persuasive image: he is to enslave them with religion, with their own acquiescence.

His Muad’Dib persona is a fearsome, sinister one: not only by the stories they tell about him (“Remember, now we speak of the Muad’Dib who ordered battle drums made from his enemies’ skin”) but by the strong and frequently marked contrast with his father: while Duke Leto’s honorable persona is linked to his choice to care much more about his people than with financial gain or his own life, Paul’s first questions after he becomes a prophet are about material things. Therefore, when Paul keeps showing reluctance to play his messianic role, it’s not that familiar part of the hero’s journey that’s at play here: Muad’Dib, after all, is everything but a hero.

This ends up transforming the whole story into a tragedy. As the reader already knows the fate of basically all the characters beforehand, what remains is to observe how they will all slowly walk into the traps laid out before them, and how they will fall, die or become tyrants.

This also reinforces the foreboding atmosphere of the early chapters. The Atreides family has to endure several days of trials, in which they’re tested with their own lives at stake. The book begins with one of such tests – Paul having to put his hand inside the box – and then quickly moves to his mother Jessica, who must bluff her way out of a perilous exchange with her new mysterious housekeeper. Leto’s test, however, is the trap set against him in Arrakis, and, for all accounts, he’s the one among them who’s going to fail: “It is said that the Duke Leto blinded himself to the perils of Arrakis, that he walked heedlessly into the pit,” a quote from “Muad’Dib: Family Commentaries” warns us.

One of the novel’s first chapters introduces the Atreides’ rivals, the despicable Harkonnens, just to reveal every trap they set against the main characters. The chapter is crucial to the narrative precisely because of the oppressive atmosphere the exposition of all their plans help to build: it’s like reading about a spider weaving its web right before its prey gets caught into it. Their characterization is also interesting – but very, very problematic – as their bodies reflect their twisted personalities. The Baron, who is the main antagonist, is a megalomaniacal buffoon, who is not satisfied with getting his revenge on Leto; he has to let the Duke know it was him that delivered the killing blow. His appearance, then, is grotesque so as to match his villainy: “As he emerged from the shadows, his figure took on dimension – grossly and immensely fat. And with subtle bulges beneath folds of his dark robes to reveal that all his fat was sustained partly by portable suspensors harnessed to his flesh.” Meanwhile, the assassin Piter is a sadistic man who takes special pleasure in every pain he causes: a man who always smiles when twisting the knife. His perversion, then, is mirrored by his body, which is very slender… and boasts an “effeminate face” – a distinguishing feature that will appear almost everything time the character is mentioned.

The first half of the novel is full of political intrigue. The characters, being well versed in the art of catching small details in the inflection of a person’s voice or and in the manner they are moving, are always observing the people around them for subtle clues of harmful intent and possible betrayal. They constantly communicate in secret sign languages and are always on the lookout for traps and poison. It’s a suffocating atmosphere, with the characters being always tense, expecting death at every corner – and rightfully so.

A simple dinner with a banker, for example, becomes an intense game of deceit, half-truths, concessions, and implied threats and warnings, as Paul and Jessica start to uncover the political nature and true intentions of their guests. This is conveyed to us not by general observations, but by very specific and acute insights: “‘It is said…’ What a curious speech mannerism they have here. If they only knew what it reveals about their dependence on superstitions,” Jessica thinks, during this scene. The narrative’s focus on thoughts – a common sentence in the book is “and (the character) thought” – also heightens this tone of intrigue, where characters have “plans within plans within plans,” since this constantly contrasts and juxtaposes the main characters’ actions with their intentions, and reveals what they grasp of the villains’ traps and what they don’t, creating this complex image of a character that is both vulnerable and highly intelligent.

The novel, however, undoubtedly suffers from a serious case of unsubtle exposition. There are a lot of info-dumps in the narrative, especially in the early chapters and at the beginning of the book’s last part. Passages full of unnecessary information being spelled out in a didactic manner are commonplace here, such as the following one in which a doctor talks to Paul about Dune’s inhabitants:

“There are two general separations of the people-Freemen, they are one group, and the others are the people of the graben, the sink, and the pan. There’s some intermarriage, I’m told. The woman of the pan and sink villages prefer Fremen husbands; their men prefer Fremen wives. They have a saying: ‘Polish comes from the cities; wisdom from the desert.’”

The association of wisdom with the desert is an important narrative element, but everything that precedes it is just uninteresting fluff. This is a constant problem that especially hurts the chapter that introduces the book’s main antagonists. Since it exposes their plan to murder Paul’s father in great detail, the pages become overcrowded with boring explanations of things that sometimes we even already know about: “In a few days Standard, the entire household of the Duke Leto will embark on a Spacer Guild liner for Arrakis. The Guild will deposit them at the city of Arrakeen rather than at our city of Carthag. The Duke’s Mentat, Thufir Hawat, will have concluded rightly that Arrakeen is easier to defend,” the assassin Piter begins to outline the plan to the Baron, although the same details were already revealed to us earlier.

The book’s final half is also not as strong as the first one. There’s a great time jump later on as the narrative becomes more focused on exploring the foreign culture of the Freemen – which has a strong Middle-Eastern influence, especially with the use of words like “jihad”– and the problems regarding the prophetic figure of the Muad’Dib. The main themes remain the same, but the info-dumps come back with a vengeance, which hurts the pace severely. The time jump, in turn, skips important character development regarding Paul’s turn into this menacing, uncaring figure, which can make his change feel a bit abrupt. Finally, the last part feels like it could have benefited from more pages to give some of the side characters a little more room to breathe – especially the ones that are introduced too late in the story but still play a great role in the final events.

Dune is a very ambitious, complex, and problematic novel. It has a huge cast of fascinating characters and a narrative structure tailor-made to delve into their minds and reinforce the tragedy of their journeys, but it also suffers from some blatant exposition, an underdeveloped ending, and a couple of harmful characterizations.

July 17, 2020.