I have now read Dune. I first conceived the ambition more than a year ago, and at last I have done it. So, do I recommend it? Well, yes, but not without reserve. Dune is written with undoubted skill and artistry, and I’ll be thinking about it in the future, both for artistic reasons and for its thematic weight. If nothing else, “Fear is the mind-killer,” is worth some adulation; it’s a quote oft apt. But I’m far from giving an unrestrained recommendation, and it’s not remotely in the same sphere as Tolkien or Chesterton.

Recommendation in Summary

As with my usual ‘review’ articles, a significant portion will be devoted not to general assessment but to specific dissections and analyses of the story. Before that, however, my recommendation overall.

If you want to read a mythic-scale novel set in space, if you are prepared to deal with a worldview radically wrong, if you do not need to have true ‘good guys’ in your story, if you don’t mind fatalism (or ‘genetic memory’ that is literally remembering everything your ancestors know), Dune is an excellent choice to read. But I didn’t get enough from it to read book 2 (at least I have no plans to); it didn’t draw me in or attach me to its narrative so as to keep my attention.

Plot

Herbert’s skill at writing an engaging plot is considerable. He weaves an escalating narrative of cross-purposes and endeavors which ratchets the tension ever and ever higher, all the while developing a mythological sense to the narrative and the world. He writes antagonists you genuinely loathe, even as you appreciate their undoubted competence, and he draws protagonistic characters into potential and actual antagonism towards each other, a web that threatens to destroy the central protagonists (Paul Atreides and Lady Jessica, as well as Lord Leto Atreides) or their allies, a danger which at times succeeds.

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I give Dune this also: it marvelously executes a simultaneous crushing victory and complete tragedy. Paul Atreides greatest triumph is the means and substance of his greatest loss, the arrival of the terror which has been building in him through the second half of the book, the looming Armageddon which he himself creates. In a way, Dune is a tragedy in which the hero’s greatest victory is his utter defeat.

Worldbuilding

The world of Dune is not perfect, but Herbert succeeded in creating a mythological sense to it. The world builds a legend of history into itself, a sensation that what happens is to be commemorated for centuries in marble, a tapestry which suggest what it hardly states: a full existence. For the purposes of the story, the worldbuilding is very well done.

But I have one complaint: the martial prowess of the Fremen. The Fremen, according to the narrative, blow the nearest competition, the Sardaukar, out of the water, and that with ease. One occasion in the early stages of the war sees a roughly 33-1 casualty ratio in the Fremen favor, when the Fremen are on the offensive against a force prepared for combat. That ratio, achieved with melee weapons, isn’t just impressive; it’s nigh superhuman. And these are desert dwellers, trained for war only incidentally, against elite soldiers who have spent years training. The Fremen have only one reasonable advantage, their environment and its forbidding of the usual shields, but 33-1 is still ridiculous. I don’t buy it, and this improbable ability of the Fremen is generally a problem for the whole narrative.

[I am given to understand that the next books in the series involve the Fremen effectively singlehandedly conquering/ semi-genociding much of the known galaxy, all off of a population that can’t exceed 8 digits, and in environments that remove the Fremen’s advantages of desert-familiarity and shieldlessness. While the Fremen have an immense logistical advantage in monopolizing FTL via the Guild (I think), I’d expect them to simply attrite to nothing over time, particularly as the ‘genocide’ thing bars a rolling conquest (recruiting from the conquered to snowball) and makes difficult an Alexander strategy (join me and I won’t destroy you). Further, that logistical advantage could easily disappear if a Guild-like organization got ahold of FTL and used the non-Spice methods explicitly available to enable mentat-FTL shenanigans.]

I also find the ‘race consciousness’ and pseudo-mystical psychic powers to be somewhat repulsive, with the first being for me particularly metaphysically unacceptable. But I can take the assumptions of both on board for the duration of the story without real difficulty, except to notice them. The first is by far the more difficult, as it is morally and metaphysically untenable (the metaphysical issue makes it even a little ridiculous, possibly the worst thing it could be for Dune’s use of it).

As a final note: I find the cultural medley of names interesting. Yueh, Jessica, Leto, Vladimir, Padishah, Duncan Idaho (!), Stilgar, Fenring, Shaddam, these are a broad swathe of strangely familiar and expectedly strange. (I expect that several of those ‘strange’ to me are in fact normal to others).

Characters

Herbert has an undoubted skill in writing despicable or unlikable villains. Baron Harkonnen is disgusting; Feyd-Rautha appears likable only in comparison with the dazzling horror of his uncle, until thought makes evident his utter turpidity. The Padishah Emperor is also, to me at least, repulsive, if not so enragingly disgusting as the Baron. I also, though I’m unsure if it’s entirely intended, violently hate Count Fenring. If I had three bullets for Dune, I’d shoot the Baron once (but first) and Fenring twice. While they were unshielded of course.¹

But here’s where we come to what I find the greatest artistic failure of the book (at least with me): I hardly cared about the vast majority of the people. I came to like Jessica by the end; I had some liking for Thufir and Irulan, more for Gunny, and a vague interest in Duncan Idaho, because he sounded cool. Probably, after Jessica, the person I most desired to see prosper was either Yueh or Leto Atreides. I hardly cared at all for Paul, when the story ended, and I barely give a rip about Chani. Stilgar seemed a tragedy, like much of the story, but I knew him only a little before that tragedy struck; his fall was more of an idea than a person.

Why? To my eye, there are fourth answers and a question to follow.

First and second, struggle and relationship. Both Leto and Yueh reveal to the reader a depth of struggle with circumstance, desire, and (to a small extent) rectitude. The duke exposes a human affection for his wife; Yueh, in his own way, is the same. Both show developed relationships with other characters, with Paul and Jessica particularly, and both have to weigh these. Jessica, meanwhile, is a long series of struggles regarding her actions towards her son and her not-husband, a struggle which builds her relationship with each of them; even the end of the narrative, where she has achieved a near inhuman state, shows her the most relatable and related of the remaining cast, the most grounded to the earth.

Conversely, Chani’s sum total of struggle and relationship seems to be some unexceptional (by the standard of her company) physical prowess, used for no great purpose, some anodyne-to-normal interactions with both Paul and Jessica, worldbuilding function vis a vis Jessica’s anointing, and her relationship with Paul. This last strikes the death blow: instead of developing a rapport, they jump straight from attraction through vague precognitive ‘relationship is already established’ to being in a relationship. I legitimately preferred Irulan to Chani at the end of the story; she’s more interesting by far, from the quotations at the beginning of the chapter, with more effect on the reader (at least in my case).

Second, virtue. As I’ll get into later, Dune has a profoundly modern, profoundly un-Christian view of morality, verging on amoralism. This seeps across so many of the characters, but it leaves those who most closely approach moral questions feeling the most human. This result should not surprise; man is made in the image of God, as a moral agent, and man without moral agency isn’t man. It is for this reason that Leto and Yueh come the nearest of most of the cast, I think, and why I like Lady Jessica the best, for her nearness to a moral choice in the end. She comes the closest to difficult virtue.²

Fourth, all else being even, readers prefer characters who either change the narrative or present the capacity to. That, to my eye, is why I like Duncan Idaho (near cipher that he is) at all. Leto Atreides possesses the capacity to change the entire course of the story for most of its time; he nearly does. Jessica is vitally important to so much. Chani does very little which an unnamed character could not. Yueh does change the narrative. The Baron and Feyd-Rautha both have effect or potential effect on the narrative (as does Fenring), but they have disgust to weigh against that (but they are still entertaining characters, in a way). And Paul…. He’s the protagonist….

The question is why I didn’t care for Paul Atreides much at all, why I would have felt more gypped by anticlimax than sad if the last paragraph of the book had been a bullet splatting his brains on the wall. Much of this, I think, can be summed up in the realization that Paul Atreides’s narrative is not truly one of maturity (as Eowyn’s is). His narrative is of transhumanism; Paul moves not towards greater humanity (maturity) but towards greater-than-humanity, towards inhumanity. This takes the first half of the book, where Paul is nascent and potential, and turns it in a direction which, to me, vitiates his likability. I don’t hate Paul, but neither do I hate a pine tree.

Paul, in the later portions of the narrative, does not act as an agent affecting the narrative. He’s immensely influential, of course, but from within we find that he acts, it seems, on mystic precognition. Worse, he acts on a precognition whose result he is explicitly terrified of. His very marriage is built not on what the reader sees play out but on an assertion of a perceived future, which incidentally robs Chani of much of her potential narrative influence and weight; she comes all but pre-installed.

Now, the precognition need not have that effect, and I do not say that Paul acts irrationally in walking straight ahead into the dread. I can see, with thought, that his desire for vengeance and the necessity of survival, under the pressure of the Fremen, and the social expectations of his new people, all of these press him forward towards the dreaded jihad, so that he seeks an escape which preserves these but (because there is none to find) finds none. The problem is that I do not see Paul struggle with these human, these partially moral questions. He simply walks towards the thing he apparently dreads (the dread of which the book effectively communicates); the reader is forced to make excuses to understand why he doesn’t make a meaningful attempt to turn aside. This element of Dune is strongly fatalistic, actually, with a certainty that the ‘race consciousness’ of mankind demands the Fremen jihad and will not be dissuaded.

Worse, because the reader understands the dread very well, Paul becomes potentially frustrating.³ He sees his doom coming, and he just keeps walking into it, never really fighting. It’s like watching a guy sitting on a conveyor belt, moving steadily towards the vat of molten metal and watching its approach. I can rationally recognize the various reasons which might or do impel him to stick to the conveyor, but if the story doesn’t show them to me, I will unavoidably start to feel that he’s simply stupid. I’ll get frustrated that he’s not trying the obvious fix (not that I see an obvious fix for Paul’s situation, once suicide is ruled out) or considering his options. I’ll grind my teeth when he tips over the edge and even feel that he deserved it.

(Remember, this is my assessment and experience; many other readers are much less affected.) 

Finally, Paul simply lacks the relational-moral weight of several other characters. His relationship with his father, ahem, diminishes in the middle of the story (losing its potential fruit); his relationship with his mother and most other characters becomes less relatable as he becomes more inhuman. His relationship with Chani, again, is a particularly striking example of this, but his regard towards his mother moves to the bitter and hard in the middle of the narrative then to what almost seems dispassionate (if conceptually caring) by the end. He has the beginning of a relationship with Stilgar, in their scenes, but then that snaps down into flatness as a part of the descent towards jihad, as part of the dread’s fulfilment, smothering also by Paul’s transcending.

His morals, meanwhile, are typically amoral throughout, but by the end of the story he acts effectively without concern for even what code he had. He perpetrates too that marriage deal at the end, which I find repulsive as a Christian. And because, as stated, I find Irulan a more likeable and interesting character than Chani. And because it contrasts sharply with the near-compassionate advice given not long prior by the Lady Jessica, highlighting Paul’s brute pragmatism even in carrying forward what is told to be (but not much demonstrated) a relationship of passion and affection (with Chani).

Amorality

The thematic weight of Dune runs across issues of transhumanism, eugenics, fatalism, race consciousness (!), and other interesting areas, but I’ll put those mostly aside for today in favor of what lies below all of them in the hierarchy of philosophy: Dune’s basic view of ethics. Dune proffers a world largely devoid of moral consideration (and certainly devoid of Christian morality). I could call it ‘amoral,’ as I have, but it does have a moral structure of sorts: sentiment. Dune, like kitschy saccharine and celebrity pastors, runs its right-or-wrong on sentimentality.

The Atreides are the good guys; the Harkonnen are the bad guys. The binary is simple. Then we consider all the complicating factors: what each actually does, the other actors who don’t sit on either side of the binary or in concert with its behavior, and how the narrative responds to all of these.

When I really look at what the Atreides do and believe, I find that they are closer to a particular interpretation of Machiavelli than to true morality. The interpretation I refer to is that Machiavelli held love and loyalty to be a stronger motivator than fear, preferring fear only because it could not regularly and reliably be instilled, with the advantages of loyalty being less than the cost of engendering it and the uncertainty of actually having it. The Atreides are not quite so calculating, but they act very much on self-interest. Their morality is overemphasized by the contrast to the Harkonnen, in the narrative, I think. Viewed independent of their world, the Atreides are restrained and pragmatically loyal but not moral, as those two virtues comprise nearly the whole of their catalogue at the base. They have too the advantage of Leto’s relationship with Jessica to create a sense of humanity and near-compassion.

The Harkonnen, meanwhile, are essentially the devils of the story. They are sadistic, Machiavellian in the popular sense, and disgusting. It’s to that last that I would point you: the horror and villainy of the Harkonnen lies not in that they do evil but in how disgusting they are. It’s true that vileness and horror follow along in evildoing’s train, but in Dune the disgust forms the backbone of why the Harkonnen are evil. We see this in part in the pragmatic nature of Atreides ‘nobility,’ how it is as much emotional more as anything else, how it is created into morality by the contrast with Harkonnen’s putridity, not its immorality.

The other parties involved in the narrative, meanwhile, can be thrown into three categories: the eager, the obsolete neutrals, and the race neutrals. The ‘eager’ are those among the Fremen and their allies who desire to make Arrakis livable. These present an intensely human, intensely likable vision, one we sympathize with, remembering in our hearts the Dominion Mandate (Gen. 1:28, 9:1,7). But if they have a moral goodness to them, it rises in the narrative through their vector of likability, not by reference to an objective standard.

The obsolete neutrals, meanwhile, are those who stand behind the times and do not engage in the full Harkonnen atrocities. Count Fenring, despite my hatred for him, belongs in this category, as do the Bene Gesserit in general, the Padishah Emperor, and the Guild. While the narrative makes out some of these to be unlikeable or even despicable, their actions appear weighted according to effect on the protagonist and according to visceral disgust, not according to the acts in themselves or in reference ot the person himself. And I call them ‘obsolete’ because they stand athwart, with varying success, the rise of the last group.

The race neutrals I have named because of their obedience to the ‘race consciousness’ which demands jihad. These are primarily the Fremen. Here we see how sentiment is still the measure of morals. As the Atreides are good by stirring admiration or identification, as the Harkonnen are evil by stirring repulsion, so the Fremen are horrifying in an almost amoral sense- which makes them a force for evil, if (because they as a race-mass are impersonal) not quite a moral force.

Before signing off, I must make a distinction. When I say that Dune presents a sentimentalist morality, an amorality in Christian terms (for morality which is merely sentiment is not morality at all, lacking authority), I’m not getting confused by an author’s refusal to press a message. Stories live out worldviews, and we can find those worldviews in the way the story shapes, in what facts are presented. Morality is a fundamental part of human psychology, and so every story must deal with it. Every author trying to deal with more than the superficial (and Herbert assuredly sought to step beyond the superficial) must provide what is necessary to make his characters moral agents, his world a moral stage. But what Herbert provides in Dune to understand the characters’ and world’s morality is sentiment: disgust, dread, sympathy. This choice communicates and is what the story considers essential to morality, its ethical worldview.

Conclusion

As I said, I’ll be thinking about Dune in the future- but I probably won’t be reading book 2. If I had to pick a reason for that choice, I’d point to my lack of care for the characters. Even my investment in for Lady Jessica, set out above, is relatively small. If she died, I’d be more annoyed at the loss of a relatively interesting character than sad. But Dune’s unrealistic understanding of morality definitely contributes to my distaste for many of the characters, and it definitely builds up my disinterest in a second book, as does the recognition that Paul must continue transhumance. So I’m content to have read Dune, and I’ll probably re-read parts (to study Herbert’s writing).

That’s all.

God bless.

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Footnotes

1. Why? It is specifically because of his bloodless, calculated complicity in his wife’s eugenicist whoring, despite apparent affection in the relationship. He thus deeply repulsed me, even more than another will, at the end of the story. ↩︎
2. The article presents an incomplete and flawed but largely true theory. ↩︎
3. I was not truly frustrated with Paul, but I enjoyed his part in the story significantly less than many others. ↩︎