Recent Reading: The Dune Trilogy
Jul. 9th, 2023 09:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rocky41_7I will probably edit this more later. Today I finished the third book of the core Dune trilogy, Children of Dune, and since I will not be reading the next two books, this seems like a good time to review. The Dune series was written by Frank Herbert in the 1960s and concerns the noble house Atreides and their intergalactic struggle for power far, far into the future of humanity.
Spoiler-ladden review under the cut.
Positives:
• If you enjoy grand stories and sagas, this one scratches that itch. This is a generational story which spans an entire planet with plenty of implications for the rest of the galaxy.
• It’s clear Herbert put a lot of thought and time into developing the world of this series. The level of detail makes the world pop off the page and you find yourself curious about many things which appear only passingly in the series.
• I love love love fantasy politics, and the Dune trilogy does this on a massive scale. Herbert’s rapidly-shifting third-person omniscient writing style allows us to see into the heads of every player in a scene and the frequent POV-changes from one area of the galaxy to another gives us a really three-dimensional view of what’s going on on the political scene, which I really enjoyed. For instance, the opening scene of Dune Messiah was an excellent execution which establishes the four characters present as well as the political atmosphere twelve years after Paul’s victory over Shaddam IV.
• Herbert comes out with some really interesting character types, but unfortunately they are not very fleshed out, as Herbert’s characters are often flat and serve the narrative more than themselves as a character.
Negatives:
• Herbert’s prose is incredibly dull. It’s awkward and at times cryptic and deeply frustrating to read. He often fails to go into detail about things that feel relevant both to understanding the world of the characters and to the plot, while waxing poetic for paragraphs about characters’ existentialist crises and “universe consciousness,” much of which is also deeply repetitive by the end of the first book. By the end of COD I felt like I was slogging through this book just to finish it.
• His dialogue is stilted and his characters rarely ever feel like real people. Given the epic scale of this saga, that may not be much of an issue for some people, but at times I found it grating that none of them ever seemed to behave like human beings.
• Herbert continually creates these interesting, allegedly powerful female characters, then spends every male perspective denigrating and undermining them, while the narrative assures us the male character of the moment is correct in recognizing this woman is actually stupid and useless. I get that the book was written in a different time, but the repeated instances of this really drained fun out of the book, especially considering all of my favorite characters were the women (would’ve gladly read an entire book from Alia’s POV). This is particularly aggravating when the woman is an adult and the male character is a child running intellectual circles around her. Wanted to gag when Irulan claimed she had actually loved Paul and just not realized it, as if he hadn’t treated her like a stupid nag for all of Dune Messiah.
• I have never been a fan of the precocious child as a character, and it’s fairly central to the plot of both Dune and Children of Dune with Paul and then with Leto and Ghanima. This again, is just a personal irritant, but it contributed to why I disliked both Paul and Leto. Both characters are incredibly arrogant and self-righteous from a very young age, believing they alone know what is correct for the universe and more than willing to brainwash entire populations into doing what they think should be done. They are both autocratic, temperamental, and often patronizing or belittling to others around them.
• All of Paul’s whining and angsting about the war in his name turned out to be empty words, since he does nothing to stop it. I feel this issue could have been perhaps avoided if there had not been such a significant time jump between Dune and Dune Messiah. Much of Dune is dedicated to Paul’s dealing with his vision of the future war—though he seems to do very little to avoid becoming this messianic figure he supposedly dreads—but Dune Messiah drops us twelve years into Paul’s reign as emperor, with the war apparently raging across the galaxy and Paul doing nothing to stop it, only bemoaning his fate and fussing about having an heir with Chani or snapping at his wife. If we had seen more of the intervening time, and perhaps efforts by Paul to stop the war which were unsuccessful, I might have been more sympathetic to him.
• Leto is an irritating copy of Paul, a child with fantastical precociousness who for reasons and by methods unclear makes himself invulnerable and installs himself as god-emperor of the galaxy at the end of Children of Dune, setting himself up to rule through brutal fear, whereas at least Paul had earned some admiration from his subjects. His twin sister Ghanima, unsurprisingly, gets the unenviable position of being forced to marry him and also forced to produce children with a man of Leto’s choosing, which she cheerfully accepts because Leto is just going through sooo much as a nearly-immortal self-proclaimed god-emperor.
• Paul and Leto are never wrong. Outside of Paul’s failure to prevent the war, which Leto criticizes him for in COD, on a personal level, these characters always win, no matter how big or small the issue. I became bored reading about any of their trials because I already know they’re going to win. They’re always the first, the best, the strongest, the smartest, the most special, the groundbreaker, etc. etc. etc. They never lose an argument, they never get tricked or one-upped, they never misread a situation, they never react emotionally rather than logically. This plays back into my earlier argument that Herbert’s characters rarely ever feel like people.
• Jessica and Alia had the only truly compelling arcs in the series and the tragedy of Alia’s doom was far more interesting to me than anything Paul, Leto, or Ghanima experienced. Paul was considerably more interesting as the failed emperor to me than he ever was as a tormented youth or ruler of the galaxy.
• I’m going to be honest, a lot of my dislike stems from the ending of COD. I hated it. I will not be rereading this series.
• Beefswelling.
Spoiler-ladden review under the cut.
Positives:
• If you enjoy grand stories and sagas, this one scratches that itch. This is a generational story which spans an entire planet with plenty of implications for the rest of the galaxy.
• It’s clear Herbert put a lot of thought and time into developing the world of this series. The level of detail makes the world pop off the page and you find yourself curious about many things which appear only passingly in the series.
• I love love love fantasy politics, and the Dune trilogy does this on a massive scale. Herbert’s rapidly-shifting third-person omniscient writing style allows us to see into the heads of every player in a scene and the frequent POV-changes from one area of the galaxy to another gives us a really three-dimensional view of what’s going on on the political scene, which I really enjoyed. For instance, the opening scene of Dune Messiah was an excellent execution which establishes the four characters present as well as the political atmosphere twelve years after Paul’s victory over Shaddam IV.
• Herbert comes out with some really interesting character types, but unfortunately they are not very fleshed out, as Herbert’s characters are often flat and serve the narrative more than themselves as a character.
Negatives:
• Herbert’s prose is incredibly dull. It’s awkward and at times cryptic and deeply frustrating to read. He often fails to go into detail about things that feel relevant both to understanding the world of the characters and to the plot, while waxing poetic for paragraphs about characters’ existentialist crises and “universe consciousness,” much of which is also deeply repetitive by the end of the first book. By the end of COD I felt like I was slogging through this book just to finish it.
• His dialogue is stilted and his characters rarely ever feel like real people. Given the epic scale of this saga, that may not be much of an issue for some people, but at times I found it grating that none of them ever seemed to behave like human beings.
• Herbert continually creates these interesting, allegedly powerful female characters, then spends every male perspective denigrating and undermining them, while the narrative assures us the male character of the moment is correct in recognizing this woman is actually stupid and useless. I get that the book was written in a different time, but the repeated instances of this really drained fun out of the book, especially considering all of my favorite characters were the women (would’ve gladly read an entire book from Alia’s POV). This is particularly aggravating when the woman is an adult and the male character is a child running intellectual circles around her. Wanted to gag when Irulan claimed she had actually loved Paul and just not realized it, as if he hadn’t treated her like a stupid nag for all of Dune Messiah.
• I have never been a fan of the precocious child as a character, and it’s fairly central to the plot of both Dune and Children of Dune with Paul and then with Leto and Ghanima. This again, is just a personal irritant, but it contributed to why I disliked both Paul and Leto. Both characters are incredibly arrogant and self-righteous from a very young age, believing they alone know what is correct for the universe and more than willing to brainwash entire populations into doing what they think should be done. They are both autocratic, temperamental, and often patronizing or belittling to others around them.
• All of Paul’s whining and angsting about the war in his name turned out to be empty words, since he does nothing to stop it. I feel this issue could have been perhaps avoided if there had not been such a significant time jump between Dune and Dune Messiah. Much of Dune is dedicated to Paul’s dealing with his vision of the future war—though he seems to do very little to avoid becoming this messianic figure he supposedly dreads—but Dune Messiah drops us twelve years into Paul’s reign as emperor, with the war apparently raging across the galaxy and Paul doing nothing to stop it, only bemoaning his fate and fussing about having an heir with Chani or snapping at his wife. If we had seen more of the intervening time, and perhaps efforts by Paul to stop the war which were unsuccessful, I might have been more sympathetic to him.
• Leto is an irritating copy of Paul, a child with fantastical precociousness who for reasons and by methods unclear makes himself invulnerable and installs himself as god-emperor of the galaxy at the end of Children of Dune, setting himself up to rule through brutal fear, whereas at least Paul had earned some admiration from his subjects. His twin sister Ghanima, unsurprisingly, gets the unenviable position of being forced to marry him and also forced to produce children with a man of Leto’s choosing, which she cheerfully accepts because Leto is just going through sooo much as a nearly-immortal self-proclaimed god-emperor.
• Paul and Leto are never wrong. Outside of Paul’s failure to prevent the war, which Leto criticizes him for in COD, on a personal level, these characters always win, no matter how big or small the issue. I became bored reading about any of their trials because I already know they’re going to win. They’re always the first, the best, the strongest, the smartest, the most special, the groundbreaker, etc. etc. etc. They never lose an argument, they never get tricked or one-upped, they never misread a situation, they never react emotionally rather than logically. This plays back into my earlier argument that Herbert’s characters rarely ever feel like people.
• Jessica and Alia had the only truly compelling arcs in the series and the tragedy of Alia’s doom was far more interesting to me than anything Paul, Leto, or Ghanima experienced. Paul was considerably more interesting as the failed emperor to me than he ever was as a tormented youth or ruler of the galaxy.
• I’m going to be honest, a lot of my dislike stems from the ending of COD. I hated it. I will not be rereading this series.
• Beefswelling.
Conclusion: To me, the effort to read the Dune trilogy is not worth the rewards. Yes, Herbert created a massive fantasy world with intriguing politics and interesting commentary on colonialism but the books degrade in quality over time, the characters are not enjoyable, and Herbert’s prose itself drags. I’m going to stick with the movie, which so far scrapes the best parts from the novel and leaves the bogged-down prose behind.
