Dune Messiah

With Denis Villeneuve’s upcoming film that shall put an end to his Dune trilogy, I have been meaning to read Dune Messiah for quite a while. I was planning to read it with a friend but I was utterly forgotten and she read it without me—don’t worry we are good lol.

In any case, I ended up choosing this as my last read for October given its relatively short length and that the film is coming in a bit more than a month by now.

While I read the original Dune after watching the movie, this time I read the book first, and it has really managed to set my expectations quite high!

Dune Messiah takes place twelve years after the first book ended, Paul started a Jihad with the Fremen, and has become the ruler of the galaxy. He is not just an Emperor, but a God for pretty much every planet he has conquered, with a new religion under his name, even if he has lost control of his own quest. He continues regardless, since this is the best outcome his prescience can conceive.

After so many worlds, and billions upon billions of deaths, a resistance develops, old powers such as the Bene Geserit, the Spacing Guild and the Tleilaxu—a new group we hadn’t seen in the original novel—join forces to develop a plan to take down the Emperor once and for all.

This book explores Paul’s inner thoughts dealing with the results on following up with his destiny. Leaving a lot of the war and the barbaric actions as something that already happened, distant from the story as of now.

There are plots within plots, there is a clash between free will and prophecy, there are characters trying to take over, each one with their own agendas. But all of this happens in a rather small scale. At the same time, it feels like future of all the universe is being written on stone.

Honestly, most of the writing is rather difficult to follow, but the weight of each conversations and political move felt huge to me the whole time. Frank’s prose and dialogue style is rather ominous, and sometimes I can see why some consider it to be trying a little too much and feeling rather “edgy”. The truth is I couldn’t stop reading. My only limiting factor this time around was my commute, and the fact I was reading the book in physical format, so I couldn’t sneak a few more pages during work hours like I often do in other books…

Anyway. This book also jumps between different characters and their points of view and inner thoughts in a moment’s notice, sometimes it can be confusing to see whose thoughts we are reading, but it gets easier over time and it allows for a lot of development to happen without the need of repeating a scene from multiple angles, which some other novels may do. It fits Dune, at least.

The plot against Paul from multiple fronts is quite nerve-wracking though, the Bene Gesserit are back, and we also get to see more of the Guild and mentats as well. The Tleilaxu and their methods are a welcome addition to Herbert’s universe, as they are able to perform acts and develop technology that clashes with the ideals of other societies, especially the Fremen, making way for interesting conflicts as Paul has to juggle with it all.

I don’t want to say much more about this one, I am very curious on checking out the last book of the original trilogy of Dune. Paul is really an interesting character, and reading about how everyone celebrates him as a hero in the novels and in the real world, even when his life is pretty much a tragedy continues to boggle my mind, a train-wreck you can’t look away from.

If there are things to critique here, or at least warn about, I’d have to mention the incestuous undertones of some of the scenes regarding Alia (who is Paul’s sister and has become a Goddess for the Fremen and the galaxy at large too), and some weird writing for the female characters who kinda seem to exist to revolve around Paul and lack more development from there (Chani has a very important role and yet we barely see her own perspective on what’s going on?).

Other than that, I was amazed by this read. I didn’t think I’d be able to be enveloped so quickly on Dune’s universe all over again, especially after literally reading a whole space opera series and all the other books since I finished the original.

This review isn’t as grandiose and epic as the one I did for the original Dune, but I think it’s fair to say that this sequal novel is on the same level as the first, if not better!

This is day 65 of #100DaysToOffload