Dune Messiah

I've seen comments that Herbert wrote this almost as a finger-wagging exercise. "The first book was all about what a bad idea messiahs are! Stop cheering on Paul!"

Here he takes that empathy that the reader necessarily has for Paul and weaponises it, in order to drill the point home.

There are a bunch of layers here, all of them around how institutions, movements, governments, and more are all of a different order to humanity, and almost necessarily inhumane as a result; messiahs must always be a spearhead at the top of a bigger more unwieldy force over which that individual may have little or no say. But this brutal fact of scale and power doesn't take away human agency, it just makes it really (really!) difficult sometimes.

Much more narrowly focused than the first book (at about a third of the size), and a little choppier for it as some narrative threads get raised, but then ignored until they show up again to get completed within the context of others. I can see why readers find it dry and less compelling (there's certainly less action) than the original. This was my view of it when I read it first thirty-some years ago, when my attitude was only one step above "Meh." But I really appreciated it this time around.

“Oof”, that was all I could think of on finishing this. Having failed to muster the interest to do this 35 years or so ago, I have, post-movie, finally caved to the fan recommendations that one “must simply” read this and the next two, at the very least.

What shall I say? 35 years ago me was right on gut judgment and the assessment of entertainment value. Herbert might have intended the Dune cycle to be a meditation on power and Messianic figures from the start, or he might simply have known a good thing when he saw it and milked the success of the first book, but there is a reason why Dune the book is an absolute classic, and Dune the series is for fanpeople* only. The writing is good and moody, but the whole thing is strung out far beyond what the flimsy structure is able to carry, a novella forcibly, and painfully, stretched to full novel length. It feels “like butter scraped over too much bread”, to quote an author who knew how to really make things last.

Which begs the question: what am I going to do with the next two novels, which I bought cheap and blind? Do bits rot if they are never read?