Oh, Dune Messiah. We could've had it all. We could've had it all.2.5-3 stars. Reviewing this book is hard, because it has such an interesting foundation, and in theory, I feel like I should have loved it -- in practice, however, the execution falls short. It takes place 12 years after the events of the first book, with Paul Atreides cemented as emperor and god-like figure, standing at the forefront of a jihad swarming across the galaxy and slaughtering billions in his name. Paul is repulsed by his own holy war, backed into a corner, struggling to figure out how to disengage and find the path of least bloodshed, wishing for the good old days of simplicity, seeking a way out that won't just leave the perpetual motion machine churning on and grinding people up without him. He's older, wiser, and far more melancholic. He's more distant from people than ever, even including his concubine/love of his life Chani, his sister Alia, and his closest advisor Stilgar. Dune Messiah is about the prophet-emperor's downfall, the dangers of a god complex, the unstoppable influence of religion, and the impossibility of extracting yourself from power without sacrifice.All of which sounds awesome, right? But the book is a trudge: where Dune was war, vengeance, bildungsroman, and Shakespearean tragedy, Dune Messiah is plodding and meandering and philosophical. Not a lot actually happens, there's very little action, and I missed characters like Jessica, Liet-Kynes, Gurney, Leto, and the Emperor or Harkonnen villains. Paul is more inaccessible to the reader than ever, thanks to his entrenched near-godhood (most of his scenes seemed to consist of him staring ponderously off in a faraway psychic trance while someone tried and failed to get his attention and engage him in conversation tbh). Almost all of the conversations between people are so mysterious/allusive/indirect/philosophical that I never really felt like I knew what the hell they were talking about, their dialogue instead existing on another plane of symbolism and opaque reference. There's an interesting setup of attempted assassinations, various schemes set in motion against the Emperor, but the lack of action really bogs the plot down; the book is much shorter than Dune, but yet I was bored stiff throughout parts of it.To be entirely honest, I just sort of wish this book had been more like A Song of Ice and Fire, and featured scheming for the throne, assassination attempts, deals, betrayal, dark magic, and political machinations, but in a thrilling fashion. The first book was more like that.The things I did like: I was very interested in Hayt as a plotline, and Alia as a hormonal, struggling teenager appealed to me much more than her wunderkind toddlerdom in the previous book. Their romance wasn't written all that well though. Irulan is also an interesting character to me, a woman placed in a very tough spot, and I actually felt for her situation quite a bit. Also, the ending is great.Lots of favourite quotes below, because the philosophical meandering is very good for producing great lines, and Herbert's actual descriptive writing style is really nice sometimes -- it's just the plot itself that dragged. (view spoiler)[“How did you overcome your kwisatz haderach?” Irulan asked.“A creature who has spent his life creating one particular representation of his selfdom will die rather than become the antithesis of that representation,” Scytale said.“I do not understand,” Edric ventured.“He killed himself,” the Reverend Mother growled.***“You think to steal the secret of it,” Mohiam wheezed. “And him with a planet guarded by his mad Fremen!”“The Fremen are civil, educated and ignorant,” Scytale said. “They’re not mad. They’re trained to believe, not to know. Belief can be manipulated. Only knowledge is dangerous.”***But, putting on a stillsuit, he put on the desert. The suit with all its apparatus for reclaiming his body’s moisture guided his thoughts in subtle ways, fixed his movements in a desert pattern. He became wild Fremen. More than a disguise, the suit made of him a stranger to his city self. In the stillsuit, he abandoned security and put on the old skills of violence.***Paul’s mouth went dry. For a moment, his nostrils tasted the smoke of a devastated future and the voice of another kind of vision commanding him to disengage . . . disengage . . . disengage. His prophetic visions had been eavesdropping on eternity for such a long while, catching snatches of foreign tongues, listening to stones and to flesh not his own. Since the day of his first encounter with terrible purpose, he had peered at the future, hoping to find peace.***Empires do not suffer emptiness of purpose at the time of their creation. It is when they have become established that aims are lost and replaced by vague ritual.***“Do you know what’s being said about your brother?” he demanded.“I know what’s being said about your Qizarate,” Alia countered. “You’re not divines, you’re god’s spies.”Korba glanced at Paul for support, said: “We are sent by the writ of Muad’dib, that He shall know the truth of His people and they shall know the truth of Him.”“Spies,” Alia said.Korba pursed his lips in injured silence.***“He didn’t kill them himself, Stil. He killed the way I kill, by sending out his legions. There’s another emperor I want you to note in passing—a Hitler. He killed more than six million. Pretty good for those days.”“Killed . . . by his legions?” Stilgar asked.“Yes.”“Not very impressive statistics, m’Lord.”“Very good, Stil.” Paul glanced at the reels in Korba’s hands. Korba stood with them as though he wished he could drop them and flee. “Statistics: at a conservative estimate, I’ve killed sixty-one billion, sterilized ninety planets, completely demoralized five hundred others. I’ve wiped out the followers of forty religions which had existed since—”“Unbelievers!” Korba protested. “Unbelievers all!”“No,” Paul said. “Believers.”“My Liege makes a joke,” Korba said, voice trembling. “The Jihad has brought ten thousand worlds into the shining light of—”“Into the darkness,” Paul said. “We’ll be a hundred generations recovering from Muad’dib’s Jihad. I find it hard to imagine that anyone will ever surpass this.” A barking laugh erupted from his throat.“What amuses Muad’dib?” Stilgar asked.“I am not amused. I merely had a sudden vision of the Emperor Hitler saying something similar. No doubt he did.”***Here lies a toppled god—His fall was not a small one.We did but build his pedestal,A narrow and a tall one. —TLEILAXU EPIGRAM***“And this is all you were thinking?”“You know better than that, Alia.”How dare he use my given name? She felt anger rise and go down beneath the memory of the way he’d spoken: softly throbbing undertones, casual male confidence. A muscle twitched along her jaw. She clenched her teeth.***“I told him that to endure oneself may be the hardest task in the universe.”She shook her head. “That’s . . . that’s . . .”“A bitter pill,” he said, watching the guards run toward them across the roof, taking up their escort positions.“Bitter nonsense!”“The greatest palatinate earl and the lowliest stipendiary serf share the same problem. You cannot hire a mentat or any other intellect to solve it for you. There’s no writ of inquest or calling of witnesses to provide answers. No servant—or disciple—can dress the wound. You dress it yourself or continue bleeding for all to see.”***Paul passed a hand across his forehead and eyes. The symbol-metropolis oppressed him. He despised his own thoughts. Such vacillation in another would have aroused his anger. He loathed his city! Rage rooted in boredom flickered and simmered deep within him, nurtured by decisions that couldn’t be avoided. He knew which path his feet must follow. He’d seen it enough times, hadn’t he? Seen it! Once . . . long ago, he’d thought of himself as an inventor of government. But the invention had fallen into old patterns. It was like some hideous contrivance with plastic memory. Shape it any way you wanted, but relax for a moment, and it snapped into the ancient forms. Forces at work beyond his reach in human breasts eluded and defied him.***She broke her gaze from Alia’s, feeling her own ambivalence and inadequacies. The pitfall of Bene Gesserit training, she reminded herself, lay in the powers granted: such powers predisposed one to vanity and pride. But power deluded those who used it. One tended to believe power could overcome any barrier . . . including one’s own ignorance.***“He didn’t use the Jihad,” Scytale said. “The Jihad used him. I think he would’ve stopped it if he could.”“If he could? All he had to do was—”“Oh, be still!” Scytale barked. “You can’t stop a mental epidemic. It leaps from person to person across parsecs. It’s overwhelmingly contagious. It strikes at the unprotected side, in the place where we lodge the fragments of other such plagues. Who can stop such a thing? Muad’dib hasn’t the antidote. The thing has roots in chaos. Can orders reach there?”“Have you been infected, then?” Edric asked.***“Tell me what you’ve seen,” Chani said.“I can’t.”“Why mustn’t I kill her?”“Because I ask it.” He watched her accept this. She did it the way sand accepted water: absorbing and concealing. Was there obedience beneath that hot, angry surface? he wondered. And he realized then that life in the royal Keep had left Chani unchanged. She’d merely stopped here for a time, inhabited a way station on a journey with her man. Nothing of the desert had been taken from her.***Paul found his attention caught by the signs above doorways, as though he were seeing them for the first time: Speed Merchants. Wind Stills and Retorts. Prophetic Prospects. Tests of Faith. Religious Supply. Weaponry . . . Propagation of the Faith . . . A more honest label would’ve been Propagation of the Bureaucracy, he thought. A type of religious civil servant had sprung up all through his universe. This new man of the Qizarate was more often a convert. He seldom displaced a Fremen in the key posts, but he was filling all the interstices. He used melange as much to show he could afford it as for the geriatric benefits. He stood apart from his rulers—Emperor, Guild, Bene Gesserit, Landsraad, Family or Qizarate. His gods were Routine and Records. He was served by mentats and prodigious filing systems. Expediency was the first word in his catechism, although he gave proper lip-service to the precepts of the Butlerians. Machines could not be fashioned in the image of a man’s mind, he said, but he betrayed by every action that he preferred machines to men, statistics to individuals, the faraway general view to the intimate personal touch requiring imagination and initiative.***Paul felt sickened. What are we doing? he asked himself. Alia was a child witch, but she was growing older. And he thought: Growing older is to grow more wicked.***She wasn’t really very old, Paul saw, but a look of lost hopes ringed her mouth, bitterness lay in her eyes.***“He always speaks thus,” Otheym apologized.“I don’t speak,” Bijaz said. “I operate a machine called language. It creaks and groans, but is mine own.”***The convoluted wording of legalisms grew up around the necessity to hide from ourselves the violence we intend toward each other. Between depriving a man of one hour from his life and depriving him of his life there exists only a difference of degree.You have done violence to him, consumed his energy. Elaborate euphemisms may conceal your intent to kill, but behind any use of power over another the ultimate assumption remains: “I feed on your energy.”***“If I could only burn this thing out of me!” she cried. “I didn’t want to be different.”“Please, Alia,” he murmured. “Let yourself sleep.”“I wanted to be able to laugh,” she whispered. Tears slid down her cheeks. “But I’m sister to an Emperor who’s worshipped as a god. People fear me. I never wanted to be feared.”***She felt that the desert had followed her wherever she had gone. Coming back to the desert was not so much a homecoming as a turning around to see what had always been there.***“She is gone,” Paul said.The ghola heard the words out of a blazing corona. They burned his chest, his backbone, the sockets of his metal eyes. He felt his right hand move toward the knife at his belt. His own thinking became strange, disjointed. He was a puppet held fast by strings reaching down from that awful corona. He moved to another’s commands, to another’s desires. The strings jerked his arms, his legs, his jaw. Sounds came squeezing out of his mouth, a terrifying repetitive noise— “Hraak! Hraak! Hraak!”The knife came up to strike. In that instant, he grabbed his own voice, shaped rasping words: “Run! Young master, run!”“We will not run,” Paul said. “We’ll move with dignity. We’ll do what must be done.”***This was more than a deathwatch, less than a wake. Paul felt his soul begging for respite, but still the vision moved him. Just a little farther now, he told himself. Black, visionless dark awaited him just ahead. There lay the place ripped out of the vision by grief and guilt, the place where the moon fell. He stumbled into it, would’ve fallen had Idaho not taken his arm in a fierce grip, a solid presence knowing how to share his grief in silence.***Paul felt himself accepting now the fact that Chani was dead. He had taken his place in a universe he did not want, wearing flesh that did not fit. Every breath he drew bruised his emotions. Two children! He wondered if he had committed himself to a passage where his vision would never return. It seemed unimportant.***Mentat, solve thyself, he thought.***The Bene Tleilax and the Guild had overplayed their hands and had lost, were discredited. The Qizarate was shaken by the treason of Korba and others high within it. And Paul’s final voluntary act, his ultimate acceptance of their customs, had ensured the loyalty of the Fremen to him and to his house. He was one of them forever now. (hide spoiler)]
I really liked Frank Herbert's classic science fiction novel Dune when I first read it a few months ago --so much so that I named it one of the best books I read that year. But upon finally getting around to the sequel, Dune Messiah I'm pretty disappointed. It's really boring.Don't get me wrong, I can see some of the impressive literary clockwork that Herbert assembles in the book. Where Dune told the story of Paul Muad’Dib's rise to the Emperor, controller of the universe's only source of the coveted super spice "melange," and general badass dude, Messiah tells the story of his downfall. It also follows through on one of the more interesting concepts introduced in the first book: Paul's spice-induced ability to foresee the eventual species-wide extinction of humans and the hard choices he has to make in order to steer history towards a lesser evil. Indeed, Messiah fast forwards to a point where Paul's fanatic followers have propagated a holy war that has destroyed entire planets and left over 60 billion people dead in just a few years. By those measures, Paul is the worst monster history has ever created, yet he has to bear the mostly private burden of knowing that he's killing all those people to save the race as a whole while simultaneously trying to outmaneuver his political opponents and crafty assassins. Angst!The problem I have with Messiah is that it suffers acutely from a kind of talking head syndrome. It's not until the back sixth or so of the book that anything interesting happens. Dune had sword fights, skirmishes, Paul and his mother tromping around the deadly desert of Arakis meeting and learning about the Fremen, and all other kinds of adventures. Messiah devotes literally dozens of pages at a time to sitting in a room listening to conspirators talk to each other. And then talking about what the talking means. And then thinking about what the talking about the talking means. It's terrible and jarring to see how Herbert has switched gears so abruptly from fascinating adventure and world building to stark exposition and naval gazing.Not that some of the ideas aren't interesting. The way that Paul must grapple with his precognition and how he has to grasp at things to try and leave humanity on the path to survival in the wake of his inevitable fall is a complex and fascinating idea, for one. And I liked the idea of how his strengths are the things that ultimately do him in --sometimes literally. It's just that I wish Herbert had found ways to make this story less tedious in its execution.Is the third book any better? I'm on the fence at this point.
What do You think about Dune Messiah (1987)?
I liked the first three, fought my way through God Emperor of Dune, and haven't managed to get through the next one at all. I think I liked it as long as it dealt with a relatively cohesive group of people - the three generations of the Atreides family.
—Mike (the Paladin)
When I finished DUNE, I was pretty reluctant to read its first sequel. This was because I read in reviews all over the Internet that it was boring that it was basically only a bridge between DUNE and CHILDREN OF DUNE.To be honest, I actually thought DUNE MESSIAH was better than DUNE. It's not quite the epic that DUNE was but I really liked how some of the character became more developed. I didn't like Paul in the first book (although I did like just about every character other than him) but I liked how the book showed his feelings toward the jihad and his prescience and how he was more sympathetic. My favorite character was probably Irulan. It's too bad she's only in the first half of the book. Alia's also pretty cool and I hope she'll be a more prominent character in CHILDREN OF DUNE. Scytale was an okay villain. One thing that was better about DUNE was that it had better villains. Scytale wasn't bad but he wasn't so awesome as Baron Harkonnen.Something I thought was interesting - Hayt reminded me of Michael Fassbender's David in PROMETHEUS. I don't know why but he did. Of all the characters who didn't appear in the first book, he was the most interesting. Well, technically, he did but it's not like I cared about Duncan Idaho. His Wikipedia page may say that he was a breakout character with fans of DUNE and that's why he's the one who was resurrected by Frank Herbert (I personally thought Thufir Hawat should have been resurrected) but I didn't think he had a big enough part to like him that much.I admit that the fourth fifth of the book gets kind of boring but the last fifth totally made up for it. The confrontation between Scytale and Paul, Paul's connection with his children, and the very last scene with Hayt/Duncan and Alia in the desert were wonderful.The only thing I thought was weird was how the Bene Tleilaxu didn't appear in DUNE but they have such a big role here.So yeah, I think DUNE MESSIAH is definitely worth taking a look at if you've read DUNE.
—Paul
I devoured this book in just 3 days, it is simply that compelling. What more can I say about the most-read sci-fi epic ever written? The Dune series has everything I want in an epic: politics, humanity, religion and space. While the first book deals with revolution, noble families and the fulfillment of prophecy, this second part deals with the personal struggle of the new leader of humanity and the emotional ramifications of being the figurehead of a jihad being waged in his name. What happens to a man with absolute power when those around him act on their belief that absolute power corrupts absolutely? Reading this story, one begins to see the themes that have permeated the biggest sci-fi stories of our time: Dune echoes throughout "the matrix" and "star wars" movies and even my beloved "Ender Wiggin Saga," in that we are thrust into a new and strange universe centered around one very human and vulnerable character, then guided through a story that strips away all of the foreign technologies and political dynamics to show us ourselves, in our own lives.Whether you read for leisure or enlightenment, the use of intrigue, violence and the overall tone of questioning the establishment will appeal. This story maturates the reader and provokes one to question the role of politics and religion in our daily existence.
—Michael
