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If you ask any first-time reader of ‘Dune’ where he or she thinks the story is likely to go in the follow-up, I doubt if anyone could have predicted ‘Dune Messiah’. It does not work as a book, as there is really no beginning, just a slow (very, very slow and exposition-laden) flat-line of a narrative that gives a slight blip at the overly dramatic ending, which is clearly meant to set-up ‘Children of Dune’ rather than end the second book in any satisfactory fashion. I think ‘Dune Messiah’ is much better-suited as the last part of ‘Dune’ itself, where it would function as a reflective coda deconstructing the consequences of the preceding events.
Clearly, ‘Dune Messiah’ did little to deter the juggernaut that the Dune books would ultimately become. It had about as much effect as poor old Paul trying to avert the jihad and prevent humanity going off the rails of civilisation. Paul spends pretty much the entire book in an existential funk, pondering his increasingly opaque and contradictory visions (much to the frustration of the patient reader, who still has no clue as to what it is he is actually ‘seeing’.)
In a throwaway line so typical of much of the off-hand nature of ‘Dune Messiah’, as if Herbert was deliberately trying to avoid emulating anything that characterised the previous book (and that had made readers fall in love with it), Paul compares notes with fellow ‘emperors’ Genghis Khan and Hitler: “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…”
This is well into the book’s last act, and does make the reader raise an eyebrow. Oh, so that’s why Paul is in such a bad mood! Apparently, it is barely 12 years after the ending of ‘Dune’, a rather odd number that I’ve seen bandied about but don’t recall being referenced in the actual text. A vast bureaucracy known as the Qizarate has arisen to administer (and temper) the religious fanaticism that has arisen around Paul.
A pilgrimage route known as the ‘hajj’ is well-established by now, with Arrakis as its ultimate destination, ensuring that the Qizarate’s coffers are always overflowing. Jessica, however, wants nothing to do with this:
Despite the special reverence held for Caladan as the place of Paul’s birth, the Lady Jessica had emphasized her refusal to make her planet a stop on the hajj.
“No doubt my son is an epochal figure of history,” she’d written, “but I cannot see this as an excuse for submitting to a rabble invasion.”
The main plot of ‘Dune Messiah’ concerns the machinations of a ‘fellowship’ of disparate stakeholders drawn into an uneasy alliance with the common purpose of unseating Paul from his throne. Herbert is always very precise about his terminology, and I am sure his reference to a ‘company of conspirators’ is a deliberate inversion of how the term ‘fellowship’ is used in ‘Lord of the Rings’, for example, the other contemporary countercultural novel that ‘Dune’ is often compared with.
While we have the usual suspects like Mohiam and Irulan, it is the new characters and players introduced into the mix that really elevates ‘Dune Messiah’ into something special. If you thought ‘Dune’ could not get any weirder than the quasi-mystical mumbo jumbo of the original, then ‘Dune Messiah’ quickly makes you realise that Herbert still has quite a number of cards up his sleeve (there is a lovely riff on the Dune Tarot set throughout the book.)
Bijaz, described as a dwarf Tleilaxu oracle, is a weird combination of Falstaff from Shakespeare and Chucky from the Child’s Play movies, and would not be out of place in a David Lynch movie. Speaking of Lynch, he obviously nicked Edric the mutated Guild Navigator straight from the pages of ‘Dune Messiah’, turning it into an indelible image in SF cinema.
Herbert seems to be a fan of baroque excess, as evinced by the flamboyant and thoroughly despicable Baron in ‘Dune’. In ‘Dune Messiah’, however, he introduces yet another shadowy player that is potentially even more perverse and grotesque, the Bene Tleilax. Just where the hell did they come from? Despite the ancient proscription on using computers that arose from the Butlerian Jihad, the Tleilaxu is clearly the predecessor of LexCorp, always flirting with dangerous technology:
The Tleilaxu displayed a disturbing lack of inhibitions in what they created. Unbridled curiosity might guide their actions. They boasted they could make anything from the proper human raw material—devils or saints. They sold killer-mentats. They’d produced a killer medic, overcoming the Suk inhibitions against the taking of human life to do it. Their wares included willing menials, pliant sex toys for any whim, soldiers, generals, philosophers, even an occasional moralist.
The best demonstration of the overriding creepiness of the Bene Tleilax, of course, is their presentation of a special gift to Paul, a ghola of Duncan Idaho himself, plucked from the battlefield and reanimated like Frankstein’s monster in an axolotl tank (clearly an inversion of the Fremen death still). Alia of the Knife, whom Herbert often reminds the reader is on the cusp of her womanhood, as if there is a noxious whiff of the Baron still hanging around, is immediately turned on by Hayt, the ghola’s Tleilaxu name. Not subtle at all, Herbert.
Alia attempts to work off some steam by sparring with an updated version of the fighting machine that Paul used on Caladan in ‘Dune’ (this one even has flashing lights.) Except she does so in the nude. Yes, sex rears its head in ‘Dune Messiah’ like Shai Hulud popping up out of the sand. (A lot of SFX ingenuity in Lynch’s 1984 ‘Dune’ went into preventing the sandworms looking like questing penises. Lynch was only partially successful, but that could have been deliberate on his part.)
Herbert reminds us that orgies were a commonplace occurrence in the Fremen sietch (if you recall, Paul first had sex with Chani in the spice-induced orgy after he kills Jamis in single-handed combat.) We even get a quotation from Chapter 3 of The Steersman’s Guild, entitled ‘THE ORGY AS A TOOL OF STATECRAFT’. And as if the Bene Gesserit weren’t in the reader’s bad books already, here they hatch a desperate plot to attempt to get Paul to fuck his sister. “…[T]hat stubborn fool of an Atreides! How could he deny the jewels of posterity within his loins?”
Poor sexually-deprived Irulan wonders idly about Edric the Guild Navigator as a potential fuck buddy, “thinking how odd it would be to mate with such a one.” This, mind you, during the first meeting of the conspirators that opens the book, where her mind should be focusing on the larger issues and not be in the gutter (or Edric’s tank, as it were.) Mohiam fondly calls Lady Jessica a “traitorous bitch”, who in turn is told by Scytale: “You are not a sex object, have never been a sex object, cannot be a sex object.” Ouch. That had to hurt as much as the gom jabbar.
Ah, Scytale. Described as a ‘Jadacha hermaphrodite’, he (pronouns weren’t as advanced in 1969 when ‘Dune Messiah’ was published), can assume either sex at will, and is commonly referred to as a Face Dancer. “For the present, I am a man,” he declares. The reader is not convinced, because there is something even oilier about Scytale than that uber-creep the Baron. It is especially uncomfortable because Herbert seems to signpost a latent effeminacy or sexual ambiguity in Scytale as being fundamentally wrong. It is clear that a lot of the convoluted sexual politics of ‘Dune’, wrapped up as it were in Herbert’s own subconscious biases towards misogyny and homophobia, begin to, er, come into play in ‘Dune Messiah’.
‘Dune Messiah’ is the literary equivalent of a ‘spice blow’, which is the result of immense pressure building up within a pre-spice mass deep within the sands of Arrakis. (Of course, this is what killed Liet Kynes when he rather stupidly went to lay on top of one in ‘Dune’.) At only about a third of the length of the original novel, so much is packed into ‘Dune Messiah’ that a spice blow is inevitable.
Herbert’s writing is always at its most delicate and evocative when he turns to Arrakis itself, and ‘Dune Messiah’ is no exception. He clearly has a deep and abiding love for the desert world he has created, which is a tabula rasa of the natural world despoiled by humanity and its increasingly dramatic and uncontrollable impact on our own planet. There is a wonderful scene near the end when Chani returns to her sietch to give birth (and precipitate the crisis that launches the next book in the sequence):
Windblown sand whipped at her, reddened her cheeks. She glanced over her shoulder at the frightful band of dust across the sky. The desert beneath the storm had taken on a tawny, restless appearance as though dune waves beat on a tempest shore the way Paul had once described a sea. She hesitated, caught by a feeling of the desert’s transience. Measured against eternity, this was no more than a caldron. Dune surf thundered against cliffs.
The storm out there had become a universal thing for her—all the animals hiding from it...nothing left of the desert but its own private sounds: blown sand scraping along rock, a wind-surge whistling, the gallop of a boulder tumbled suddenly from its hill—then! somewhere out of sight, a capsized worm thumping its idiot way aright and slithering off to its dry depths.
As far as I recall, this is the only worm sighting in the entire book, apart from a side plot involving a bunch of Fremen traitors capturing a small maker to take it off-planet and start the spice cycle on a similar world. Ah, but they don’t know about the sand plankton that is such an integral part of the sandworm lifecycle, which is probably what George Lucas had in mind when he started tinkering with the role of midichlorians as an essential component of the Star Wars universe.
Herbert continues:
Sietch odors assaulted her nostrils. The place was a ferment of nasal memories—the warren closeness of bodies, rank esters of the reclamation stills, familiar food aromas, the flinty burning of machines at work...and through it all, the omnipresent spice: melange everywhere.
She took a deep breath. “Home.”
Extraordinary. And it is exactly as if the reader him- or herself has returned home, to the deep desert of Arrakis where it all began. Chani’s viewpoint is reflected in Paul’s own perspective:
Ugly, barren land! He imagined it sun-soaked and monstrous with heat, a place of sandslides and the drowned darkness of dust pools, blowdevils unreeling tiny dunes across the rocks, their narrow bellies full of ochre crystals. But it was a rich land, too: big, exploding out of narrow places with vistas of storm-trodden emptiness, rampart cliffs and tumbledown ridges.
All it required was water...and love.
Life changed those irascible wastes into shapes of grace and movement, he thought. That was the message of the desert. Contrast stunned him with realization. He wanted to turn to the aides massed in the sietch entrance, shout at them: If you need something to worship, then worship life—all life, every last crawling bit of it! We’re all in this beauty together!
Yes, I know that this is Herbert at his most ‘hippy dippy’ – and it is certainly no surprise that a novel as batshit crazy as this would have such a deeply Age of Aquarius moment in it. But, for me, this is still one of the most remarkable, and memorable, passages in the entire saga. It is the ‘Circle of Life’, writ boldly on the ever-shifting sands of Dune.
Clearly, ‘Dune Messiah’ did little to deter the juggernaut that the Dune books would ultimately become. It had about as much effect as poor old Paul trying to avert the jihad and prevent humanity going off the rails of civilisation. Paul spends pretty much the entire book in an existential funk, pondering his increasingly opaque and contradictory visions (much to the frustration of the patient reader, who still has no clue as to what it is he is actually ‘seeing’.)
In a throwaway line so typical of much of the off-hand nature of ‘Dune Messiah’, as if Herbert was deliberately trying to avoid emulating anything that characterised the previous book (and that had made readers fall in love with it), Paul compares notes with fellow ‘emperors’ Genghis Khan and Hitler: “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…”
This is well into the book’s last act, and does make the reader raise an eyebrow. Oh, so that’s why Paul is in such a bad mood! Apparently, it is barely 12 years after the ending of ‘Dune’, a rather odd number that I’ve seen bandied about but don’t recall being referenced in the actual text. A vast bureaucracy known as the Qizarate has arisen to administer (and temper) the religious fanaticism that has arisen around Paul.
A pilgrimage route known as the ‘hajj’ is well-established by now, with Arrakis as its ultimate destination, ensuring that the Qizarate’s coffers are always overflowing. Jessica, however, wants nothing to do with this:
Despite the special reverence held for Caladan as the place of Paul’s birth, the Lady Jessica had emphasized her refusal to make her planet a stop on the hajj.
“No doubt my son is an epochal figure of history,” she’d written, “but I cannot see this as an excuse for submitting to a rabble invasion.”
The main plot of ‘Dune Messiah’ concerns the machinations of a ‘fellowship’ of disparate stakeholders drawn into an uneasy alliance with the common purpose of unseating Paul from his throne. Herbert is always very precise about his terminology, and I am sure his reference to a ‘company of conspirators’ is a deliberate inversion of how the term ‘fellowship’ is used in ‘Lord of the Rings’, for example, the other contemporary countercultural novel that ‘Dune’ is often compared with.
While we have the usual suspects like Mohiam and Irulan, it is the new characters and players introduced into the mix that really elevates ‘Dune Messiah’ into something special. If you thought ‘Dune’ could not get any weirder than the quasi-mystical mumbo jumbo of the original, then ‘Dune Messiah’ quickly makes you realise that Herbert still has quite a number of cards up his sleeve (there is a lovely riff on the Dune Tarot set throughout the book.)
Bijaz, described as a dwarf Tleilaxu oracle, is a weird combination of Falstaff from Shakespeare and Chucky from the Child’s Play movies, and would not be out of place in a David Lynch movie. Speaking of Lynch, he obviously nicked Edric the mutated Guild Navigator straight from the pages of ‘Dune Messiah’, turning it into an indelible image in SF cinema.
Herbert seems to be a fan of baroque excess, as evinced by the flamboyant and thoroughly despicable Baron in ‘Dune’. In ‘Dune Messiah’, however, he introduces yet another shadowy player that is potentially even more perverse and grotesque, the Bene Tleilax. Just where the hell did they come from? Despite the ancient proscription on using computers that arose from the Butlerian Jihad, the Tleilaxu is clearly the predecessor of LexCorp, always flirting with dangerous technology:
The Tleilaxu displayed a disturbing lack of inhibitions in what they created. Unbridled curiosity might guide their actions. They boasted they could make anything from the proper human raw material—devils or saints. They sold killer-mentats. They’d produced a killer medic, overcoming the Suk inhibitions against the taking of human life to do it. Their wares included willing menials, pliant sex toys for any whim, soldiers, generals, philosophers, even an occasional moralist.
The best demonstration of the overriding creepiness of the Bene Tleilax, of course, is their presentation of a special gift to Paul, a ghola of Duncan Idaho himself, plucked from the battlefield and reanimated like Frankstein’s monster in an axolotl tank (clearly an inversion of the Fremen death still). Alia of the Knife, whom Herbert often reminds the reader is on the cusp of her womanhood, as if there is a noxious whiff of the Baron still hanging around, is immediately turned on by Hayt, the ghola’s Tleilaxu name. Not subtle at all, Herbert.
Alia attempts to work off some steam by sparring with an updated version of the fighting machine that Paul used on Caladan in ‘Dune’ (this one even has flashing lights.) Except she does so in the nude. Yes, sex rears its head in ‘Dune Messiah’ like Shai Hulud popping up out of the sand. (A lot of SFX ingenuity in Lynch’s 1984 ‘Dune’ went into preventing the sandworms looking like questing penises. Lynch was only partially successful, but that could have been deliberate on his part.)
Herbert reminds us that orgies were a commonplace occurrence in the Fremen sietch (if you recall, Paul first had sex with Chani in the spice-induced orgy after he kills Jamis in single-handed combat.) We even get a quotation from Chapter 3 of The Steersman’s Guild, entitled ‘THE ORGY AS A TOOL OF STATECRAFT’. And as if the Bene Gesserit weren’t in the reader’s bad books already, here they hatch a desperate plot to attempt to get Paul to fuck his sister. “…[T]hat stubborn fool of an Atreides! How could he deny the jewels of posterity within his loins?”
Poor sexually-deprived Irulan wonders idly about Edric the Guild Navigator as a potential fuck buddy, “thinking how odd it would be to mate with such a one.” This, mind you, during the first meeting of the conspirators that opens the book, where her mind should be focusing on the larger issues and not be in the gutter (or Edric’s tank, as it were.) Mohiam fondly calls Lady Jessica a “traitorous bitch”, who in turn is told by Scytale: “You are not a sex object, have never been a sex object, cannot be a sex object.” Ouch. That had to hurt as much as the gom jabbar.
Ah, Scytale. Described as a ‘Jadacha hermaphrodite’, he (pronouns weren’t as advanced in 1969 when ‘Dune Messiah’ was published), can assume either sex at will, and is commonly referred to as a Face Dancer. “For the present, I am a man,” he declares. The reader is not convinced, because there is something even oilier about Scytale than that uber-creep the Baron. It is especially uncomfortable because Herbert seems to signpost a latent effeminacy or sexual ambiguity in Scytale as being fundamentally wrong. It is clear that a lot of the convoluted sexual politics of ‘Dune’, wrapped up as it were in Herbert’s own subconscious biases towards misogyny and homophobia, begin to, er, come into play in ‘Dune Messiah’.
‘Dune Messiah’ is the literary equivalent of a ‘spice blow’, which is the result of immense pressure building up within a pre-spice mass deep within the sands of Arrakis. (Of course, this is what killed Liet Kynes when he rather stupidly went to lay on top of one in ‘Dune’.) At only about a third of the length of the original novel, so much is packed into ‘Dune Messiah’ that a spice blow is inevitable.
Herbert’s writing is always at its most delicate and evocative when he turns to Arrakis itself, and ‘Dune Messiah’ is no exception. He clearly has a deep and abiding love for the desert world he has created, which is a tabula rasa of the natural world despoiled by humanity and its increasingly dramatic and uncontrollable impact on our own planet. There is a wonderful scene near the end when Chani returns to her sietch to give birth (and precipitate the crisis that launches the next book in the sequence):
Windblown sand whipped at her, reddened her cheeks. She glanced over her shoulder at the frightful band of dust across the sky. The desert beneath the storm had taken on a tawny, restless appearance as though dune waves beat on a tempest shore the way Paul had once described a sea. She hesitated, caught by a feeling of the desert’s transience. Measured against eternity, this was no more than a caldron. Dune surf thundered against cliffs.
The storm out there had become a universal thing for her—all the animals hiding from it...nothing left of the desert but its own private sounds: blown sand scraping along rock, a wind-surge whistling, the gallop of a boulder tumbled suddenly from its hill—then! somewhere out of sight, a capsized worm thumping its idiot way aright and slithering off to its dry depths.
As far as I recall, this is the only worm sighting in the entire book, apart from a side plot involving a bunch of Fremen traitors capturing a small maker to take it off-planet and start the spice cycle on a similar world. Ah, but they don’t know about the sand plankton that is such an integral part of the sandworm lifecycle, which is probably what George Lucas had in mind when he started tinkering with the role of midichlorians as an essential component of the Star Wars universe.
Herbert continues:
Sietch odors assaulted her nostrils. The place was a ferment of nasal memories—the warren closeness of bodies, rank esters of the reclamation stills, familiar food aromas, the flinty burning of machines at work...and through it all, the omnipresent spice: melange everywhere.
She took a deep breath. “Home.”
Extraordinary. And it is exactly as if the reader him- or herself has returned home, to the deep desert of Arrakis where it all began. Chani’s viewpoint is reflected in Paul’s own perspective:
Ugly, barren land! He imagined it sun-soaked and monstrous with heat, a place of sandslides and the drowned darkness of dust pools, blowdevils unreeling tiny dunes across the rocks, their narrow bellies full of ochre crystals. But it was a rich land, too: big, exploding out of narrow places with vistas of storm-trodden emptiness, rampart cliffs and tumbledown ridges.
All it required was water...and love.
Life changed those irascible wastes into shapes of grace and movement, he thought. That was the message of the desert. Contrast stunned him with realization. He wanted to turn to the aides massed in the sietch entrance, shout at them: If you need something to worship, then worship life—all life, every last crawling bit of it! We’re all in this beauty together!
Yes, I know that this is Herbert at his most ‘hippy dippy’ – and it is certainly no surprise that a novel as batshit crazy as this would have such a deeply Age of Aquarius moment in it. But, for me, this is still one of the most remarkable, and memorable, passages in the entire saga. It is the ‘Circle of Life’, writ boldly on the ever-shifting sands of Dune.
