Dune Messiah by Frank Herbert
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
While smaller and equally intense, this is a very different book than its original. In this, the action of life and death is toned down somewhat — but the ideas at play engage at a deeper level. Whereas the first Dune was more about what was at stake for the characters as individuals, in this book, what is at stake is less one’s lives than the fate of this enormous number of people.
I am a little bit fuzzy on who this messiah is supposed to be. Is this Paul? Is it Idaho? Or the children to come?
As always, Herbert’s dialogue is multi-faceted, with tense reflecting of so many different angles at once. I enjoy reading his dialogue as he is able to say much with so little. At the same time though, I think he explains too much. His characters sometimes exclaim or show harsh feelings in a way that seems like they are on edge all the time. But I suppose Alia and Paul (and others) prescience would lead anyone to be jumpy, if your entire future unraveled depending on what happens to you.
In a way though, I doubt that the future works this way; Herbert explains this as a kind of Bergsonian unfolding in which the past and the future have a present beside you. This retroactive ex (ante/post) facto synthesis is in fact how Hegel (and Zizek) explains dialectical synthesis. Depending on your current situation, new information will shift your context such that the future and past become revealed as differences in the present. As the present becomes a different present, so shall the past and future also shift. The past and future then, are little more than extensions of the very relations we embody. As new information forces a shift in relations so their extensions shift — in all dimensions, even temporal ones! As Zizek says, our envisioning of the future is always a utopic vision in terms of the present. We are in this sense, truly unable to comprehend any future whatsoever. And that proves true of prescience in this book. Possible futures are not really prescience futures, they are in this sense, truly analytic processes.
All the same though, I think this book — this series — is well worth the read. How it unravels and what is at stake is always far more weightier than what we may think of. Paul’s awareness in this book is monolithic — I am in awe of Herbert’s imagination, of his ability to tease out all the relations that would embody having an empire of this magnitude.
Having said this, I think some readers may be put off by how little “action” there is in the book. I suppose some may expect tension and plot to be expressed by dramatic effects like people being stabbed or things being blown up. In this sense, much of the book’s tension comes from the characters attempting to figure out who they are and what they are supposed to do. The “bad guys” however, know what they need to do; they lack the vision that the protagonists exhibit. And strangely enough, this is often reversed in standard stories; where good guys know what is at stake and the bad guys are not sure but want to find “it” or “get it”, whatever this absolute power is. Because of this reversal, this book is actually more in line as a spiritual journey than anything else, where the protagonists seek to find illumination. As Herbert states so succinctly,”enlightenment is not separate from its means” (and there is much to be quoted from this book in this manner!) And so, the tension and “journey” in this book is much like the mystical affects found in like books of spiritual awakenings.
The complexity of this primal mysticism with “high” technology of unthinkable means is, I realize, perhaps the most influential factor from the Dune series, that Herbert wasn’t just writing about some other world, but rather, struggling to make sense of the one we live in now. What he finds to be at stake today (or in its first publication in the 1960s) is still relevant, after all, we live in an age of seemingly unlimited technological wonder but struggle personally with our faith in our leaders, our planet and our seeming lack of direction. The jihad of Dune’s universe is the globalization of our planet, where we march as soldiers to wealth and knowledge but lack the prescience to understand how we have changed what we are reterritorializing, even as we seek material abundance and yet continue to find human misery and empty struggle, leaving us at times without even our utopic drive we initially entered the fray with.
In this sense, Dune Messiah is but a transitional text to the next one. But it does such a good job at laying down the lines for what is to come next! Do not read this book unless you like intellectual mysticism and want to be mired in its sequels!
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