| Product: |
Dune - Frank Herbert |
| Date: |
10/08/01 (1013 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: Fascinating, compelling, staggeringly detailed
Disadvantages: Too serious
Dune is one of very few science fiction books which I first read in my teens, which I still give shelf space to and which I feel likely to read again. Written in the sixties, it is a product of its time – consciousness expanding drugs and ecological concerns feature heavily - but it manages to remain relevant, despite the fact that technology has already surpassed what most science fiction writers of that era imagined possible.
Frank Herbert has catalogued the future as he sees it exhaustively. Arrakis, or Dune, the desert planet on which the space drama unfolds, has a deceptively rich and varied ecology, one which Herbert has tortured into a logical form by the power of his imagination and his intelligence. Which is really quite a feat, considering the fact that a major part of this ecosystem are monstrous worms, hundreds of metres long which swim through the sand and excrete an hallucinogenic, life extending, addictive, and really quite tasty spice.
But the planet Dune and its creatures are just the beginning of Herbert’s creative virtuosity. We learn that the worm spice, Melange, is the most important substance in the universe, as its use is makes interstellar travel possible by allowing pilots, trained by the monopolistic ‘Spacing Guild’ the facility to achieve ‘the mind-groping-ahead-through-possible-futures that guided hurtling spaceships’. (Put simply, no more spice would mean no more space travel, which would make for a considerable problem when humanity is scattered over thousands of planets across several galaxies.)
As if that weren’t enough Herbert describes the politics, economics, and science of the brave new universe. Humanity, scattered across planets, is ruled by planetary feudal lords, who are in turn governed by the Landsraad, a political organisation headed by an Emperor, who maintains control through political wrangling of the most Machiavellian order, and the brute force of hi
s personal army. (The deadly Sardaukar, human stock evolved into killing machines through being born and raised on a ‘hell planet’.)
The marketplace of the future is controlled by a massive conglomerate called CHAOM, which takes a slice of all legal commerce in the empire, and wields enormous power in the name of profit. Technology has progressed and regressed, there being laser weapons, space travel and force fields; but computers are long gone, and there is a preference for one to one combat with swords and knives, which initially seems perverse, but is soon explained by the author’s unflagging genius for futurology.
Oh, and there’s religion too. The bible survives and is spread across the galaxy (albeit now available in an edition the size of a thumbtip.) There are nuns of a sort, a sisterhood called the Bene Gesserit (I’d be fascinated to learn where Herbert got all these names from), who are preparing for the second coming, in the form of a super evolved human being they refer to as the Kwisatz Haderach. Coming back full circle, the inhabitants of Dune are also preparing for the second coming, a prophet known to them as the Lisan Al-Gaib (which the glossary explains translates to ‘The Voice from the Outer World’. Oh yes, there’s a glossary. And appendices.) Dune is about the coming of that prophet.
Now, having read all that, you’re probably either quite impressed by the breadth of Herbert’s extraordinary vision, or else pretty bored. And those that read the book seem similarly divided. My grandfather, who I’m quite used to thinking of as the kind of man readily able to cope with slow plot-lines, put it to one side after less than a hundred pages, declaring it dull. It seems a common complaint that the book is slow to get off the ground. Compared to the majority of space operas, I suppose it is. However, the book simply wouldn’t make sense with less detail. There
’s only just enough to explain the new nature of the universe, and without the glossary the first read would certainly be hard going. Aside from that, there’s the more significant fact that Herbert is putting together a plot that is subtle, complex, and clever.
At the outset of the novel Dune, previously ruled by the villainous Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, has just been handed over to the noble duke Leto Atreides. The political machinations of the villainous Baron and the Emperor combined have placed the noble duke Leto in the hot seat of power over the desert planet, with the intention of securing his downfall. Tricked, betrayed and overwhelmed, the duke is soon overthrown, but his son, Paul, who may or may not be the Kwisatz Haderach survives to fight another day. In due course Paul joins forces with the natives of the deep deserts of Dune, the massively resourceful and hardy Fremen, and through his own extraordinary talents and with these doughty warriors at his side, he becomes a force to make his enemies tremble.
The politicking and alliances that bring about Duke Leto’s demise are necessary background, and Herbert builds them in slowly, along with the basic information we need about Arrakis, the empire, and the Bene Geserit sisterhood and its quest for the Kwisatz Haderach. If Herbert hadn’t put all of this detail together in his own mind so obsessively, hadn’t made sure that it all hung together so comprehensively, then the book would certainly have been a boring, confusing mess. But Herbert pulls it off. The reader may have to concentrate, which is admittedly something quite unusual for the genre, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. By the time the action begins, the background that has already been assimilated adds to the power of the events that unfold.
And Herbert’s ideas are interesting. Aside from the politics, economics, and ecology, human evolution is a recurring theme of the book
. There are no computers in Herbert’s vision, because generations before the events described in the book, humanity waged a ‘Butlerian Jihad’ against thinking machines, wiping them out, and lo and behold, a sub-species of human evolved to replace them, the Mentats. The name of the Jihad refers to Samuel Butler, who wrote in ‘Erewhon’ of a society in which technology had been deliberately regressed to stop machines developing a life of their own and enslaving humanity. Thought provoking stuff indeed.
I’ve mentioned already that the hardiest warriors of the Imperium were evolved into killing machines by being raised in ‘an environmental background of such ferocity that it killed six out of thirteen persons before the age of eleven’. It is the unrelenting punishment doled out by the environment of Dune that make the Fremen such a force to be reckoned with. But further than this, it transpires that the Kwisatz Haderach is intended to be the culmination of a selective breeding program spanning thousands of generations, a kind of evolutionary throw forward, destined to lead Humanity into a new golden age.
Eugenics is the science of the future, it seems. The end of Dune sees a vast army of Fremen poised to sweep across the galaxy in a great Jihad, spreading their seed on the way, and thereby improving mankind’s breeding stock. Herbert is clearly fascinated by the potential waiting to be tapped in the vast human gene pool, which to be released requires only that someone with a big enough stick stir it occasionally. It is a theme to which he returns in more detail in the later books of the Dune cycle, but it is clearly outlined here. The author invites us to think about our relationship with our environment, our technology, and what those relationships, combined with our knowledge of the processes of evolution, imply for our future.
Sadly, with all the science and politicking and philosophy go
ing on, something else has to give. Dune isn’t a particularly long book, about four hundred and fifty pages, and along with all the above, there’s a fair bit of plot in there as well. This leaves Herbert little time for his characters, and no time at all for humour. Dune is a very serious book.
The main characters are acceptably realised. We mainly get to know them through their thoughts (lots of italic script – reminiscent of a Stephen King book), which is the best way in a novel in which so many of the characters have ‘plans within plans’. Baron Harkonnen is a fine portrayal of calculating selfishness, greed, and good old fashioned evil, as is his equally villainous nephew Feyd-Rautha. Duke Leto impresses with his courage and humanity. Paul Atreides just about remains convincingly human for the bulk of the book, even as he becomes a superman (largely due to the strong relationship with his mother, Jessica.) However, living in the character's thoughts leaves us at times out of touch with their feelings. For example Paul picks up a wife on the way, who barely gets a look in, and towards the end of the book, when he suffers the death of one of his closest family, he hardly seems distracted at all.
Herbert makes interesting use of language. The technology of the future comes with a variety of cool names: Lasguns, ornithopters, plasteel, stillsuits, poison snoopers, suspensors, cones of silence. But the names and colloquialisms of the people of the future are a right old mixture. An awful lot of the Dune speak is authentic sounding arabic (I know nothing of the language, so forgive me if I’m off the mark here): Shai-Hulud, Muad’Dib, Lisan al Gaib. However in the off-worlders there is a wild mish mash of names and words from all over our globe. Duncans rub shoulders with Letos and Shaddams, and Vladimirs with Piters and Neyfuds and characters even occasionally lapse into speaking French. I mention this, b
ecause I think it’s another way of Herbert getting his point home about the mixing of the gene pool. Humanity has clearly got this far through assimilating all its cultures into the breeding stock.
I think Dune is a great science fiction novel. It’s never less than readable, and once the scene is set it rapidly becomes compelling. It certainly leaves me wondering about the author, and how much of his time he spent in the real world, as opposed to the one he had constructed in such intricate detail in his head. In terms of imaginative scope the universe of Dune probably deserves to be compared with Tolkien’s Middle Earth, although Tolkien had a surer hand when it came to populating his world with characters. Why only four stars? Well, I’d give it the fifth, if it had made me smile even once. After all, to set a book on a world in which men ride into war on the backs of kilometre long worms without even offering a knowing wink at the Freudian symbolism of it all is to take oneself entirely too seriously.
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