Dune Messiah by: Frank Herbert

 

When I originally reviewed Dune back in 2021 I received a rather long comment about how I didn’t get the novel despite giving that book a perfect 10/10 score and lauded it as a classic due to my interpretation of the novel and Herbert’s outlook on life as rather cynical and implied I was too dumb to get it because I review a lot of Doctor Who.  It’s not the reason I waited so long to read Dune Messiah, but after doing so all the points I made in my original review for Dune still stand.  They should also be amplified after reading the sequel to Dune, which sadly despite being only about half the length of the original isn’t quite as good.  It’s honestly surprising that Dune Messiah works at all as a standalone novel considering as a sequel it is really just the ending of Dune.  Yes, this is a novel that jumps ahead twelve years, but it’s the book that chronicles Paul’s downfall as Dune chronicled his rise to power which is necessary to get a complete exploration of Herbert’s views of authority and government in the mid to late 1960s.  The title being messiah is integral for what Herbert is trying to say, this book and the one before it are essentially about what happens when someone who starts out as a genuinely good and innocent, though privileged, person is given absolute power.  That absolute power is wielded by Paul Atredies in the interim between novels for what he believes to be absolute good, but dropped into the narrative is the fact that in his crusade to rule the known universe, already further ambitions than he had when introduced in Dune, he is directly responsible for the deaths of 61 billion people.

 

Herbert, despite including the deaths of 61 billion people and being a very talented writer, doesn’t entirely show the gravity or scale of this many deaths, but he does excel at showing how callous it has made Paul.  Paul is convinced that these deaths are somehow the better outcome, becoming obsessed with the idea that humanity needs to be constantly progressing and avoiding stagnation which in his mind will lead to inevitable decay.  While I am unsure of Herbert’s intentions with this, it does lend itself to an anti-capitalist reading with Paul representing the upper classes that need to be put down, however this could easily be me extrapolating from Herbert’s clear point against messianic figures.  The fall of Paul is really what Dune Messiah and that leads to the largest issue of the novel being that compounding it with Herbert’s very dense prose is that it just moves much slower and almost feels bloated in places.  The worldbuilding manages to expand greatly, the Bene Gesserit alliance with the Tleilaxu resurrecting Duncan Idaho is a fascinating idea despite Hayt becoming the primary love interest for Alia Atreides, who is only a teenager, and the state of the Empire in general are both fascinating.  Princess Irulan is a fascinating character to really see here as her presence in Dune was mainly through the epigraphs and Chani actually gets more focus on the relationship with Paul.  In doing this Herbert does reduce Chani to just a lovee interest again which is a shame as a character she has so much more.

 

Overall, Dune Messiah despite being shorter and published separately is inseparable from Dune, enhancing what makes the previous novel work but since it is standalone it does not actually stand alone.  This is also the novel to read if you maybe didn’t entirely like Dune as the extra 350 pages or so of the sequel actually wrap up the plot threads nicely and make the themes more apparent.  8/10.