Dune Messiah (Dune Chronicles, Book 2) by Frank Herbert
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Book Reviews of Dune Messiah (Dune Chronicles, Book 2)
Book Review: Escaping the inevitable
Summary: 5 Stars
I read this having read Dune a few years before. So I knew what was up, but not names and details. I still followed this fine. It takes place about 12 years after the previous book so you don't come in in the middle of a twisty plot. It would be fine to read without having read Dune first (I liked both books, but Dune was happier so read that one first anyway.)
Dune Messiah begins with a meeting of conspirators as they plan how to take down the emperor Paul and come out politically ahead. The conspirators are: Irulan, Paul's wife who he married for politics and will never sleep with. She wants an heir. A member of the guild who controls space travel (Paul can't see what goes on in the prescence of a guild member. He wants spice (drugs -yum). The Bene-Geserit mother. She hates Paul personally as well as politically. And a shape shifter.
They agree to the shape shifter's plan of psychological poison for Paul, in the form of the reanimated corpse of his childhood mentor, Duncan Idaho, and present Idaho to Paul as a gift. Idaho is an interesting character. He has all the old Idaho's memories but knows that he has been tweaked in the reanimation process and that he meant to set Paul up. He doesn't know how and is consciously trying to protect Paul. Also Paul's sister, Alia, is fifteen and full of hormones. She is obviously attracted to Idaho.
Paul is at a point where he sees the world around him entirely through his spice enhanced psychic senses. He can't see a way to escape the future that he sees and is trying to steer things away from the worst possible fates: universe wide genocides, his whole family killed off, etc. He is concerned protecting his wife Chani (not politically recognized). He realizes that she will die after bearing a child, and so has not confronted Irulan about giving her birth control for the last 12 years. Chani has gotten pregnant and so Paul has a limited amount of time to arrange things.
Many of the characters here are driven by the struggle to influence the inevitable but still unpredictable future: Paul's wives are interested in moving before the biological clock stops ticking. Paul sees the future but not all the details further away in time. Idaho realizes he will be used against Paul and is trying to avoid it.
Dune Messiah is a book with nice plot and characters as well as the whole psychic seeing the future through drugs thing. It is a good book, but I recommend reading Dune first, only because this book is so dark. If you liked Dune then Dune Messiah will live up to your expectations.
Book Review: Finishes Making Herbert's Point
Summary: 5 Stars
While Dune Messiah is the second part of the Dune trilogy, I think Frank Herbert really accomplished his goal of describing the failure of the future-seeing hero in this book. Unfortunately, you might have to read the first Dune book to get to this one.The second book takes over twelve years after Paul Atreides' triumph over Emperor Shaddam IV. He is master of all he surveys, and yet he sees trouble on the horizon, trouble which none of his miraculous powers can stop. He can only bide his time until "the inevitable" comes to pass. Herbert is not fond of this vision for humanity (to know the future in advance), and he makes that very plain in this novel. In many ways, Dune Messiah is a much easier book to read than the first one, as everything is set out in much plainer language.
There is a conspiracy against Emperor Paul Muad'Dib (spelled with a lower-case "Muad'dib," just to confuse me) in this book, as well. We have the wicked old crone, Gaius Helen Mohiam, a Spacing Guild Navigator, the history-writing, conniving Princess Irulan, and something not mentioned in the first book: Scytale, a Tleilaxu "Face Dancer" (shape-shifter). Herbert manages to conjure all of these characters up believably, and also portrays what's going on in everyone's head. The motivations are clearer in this book, and the imagery (for me) much better.
We also find Paul's sister Alia has become a power in her own right, conducting ceremonies she does not believe and which give her no peace, but which somehow manage to calm the masses. Herbert is unflinching in his judgment of Paul and Alia as religious manipulators, and manages to question (as might a suitably inclined reader) how the average person could believe such hokum. Herbert seems to insinuate that religious conviction comes at the point of a sword, a belief which might hold a slight grain of truth, depending on which of the sword you're on.
The book also contains the first appearance of a "ghola," a body raised from the dead by the genetic technology of Bene Tleilax, but with no memory of its former self. The ghola, in this case, happens to be the loyal Atreides retainer, Duncan Idaho. Duncan, too, has a role to play. Even when he states bluntly that he was sent to destroy Paul, that does not prevent him from drawing close to the Emperor. This is all remarkable stuff, and richly told.
In the end, the universe outguesses Paul Atreides. That's the best way I can explain the ending without telling you the ending in specific detail. I really enjoyed this book, and find it a quick and quotable story.
Book Review: The End of an Epic - He died for their sins.....
Summary: 5 Stars
I read Dune over three years ago, and naturally I loved it. When I tried to read Dune Messiah I couldn't, I found it boring, and felt that the main character was now too old.Recently, I reread Dune and continued on through to Dune Messiah, reading both in only two weeks.
Dune Messiah is really just a continuation of the first, and it delivers a 'triumphant tragedy' that is makes a fitting end to the life of a Messiah.
Paul is thirty now (not very old at all), and the Jihad he feared so much is serving the purpose it is supposed to, mingling the genes of humanity and ending the stagnation that existing under the old Imperial system. He has been made both an Emporer and a God, and Alia leads his religion. Pilgrims come in their thousands to Arrakis to experience his Holyness.
However, there are many who plot against him. The Bene Gesserit wish to destroy Paul before he has the chance to establish an Atreides dynasty and regain the precious genes they worked so hard to create. The Fremen long for the old ways when water was precious and Arrakis was theirs. The Bene Tleilax want to gain a kwisatz haderach they can control, and the priests of Maud'Dib's own religion wish to make a martyr of him.
And with his prescience, Paul sees disaster for all man kind unless he follows one set path of the future, but is he willing to pay the price that comes with that future?
The plots that surround Paul are intriguing in their own right, but more intriguing is the development of Paul himself. Or rather, Paul's realisation that what he has created leads to its own stagnation. His powers also develop somewhat, making him an even more realistic Messiah, and finally, it ends in what is in many ways a tragedy, I certainly left this book feeling sad, but it is also in many ways a triumph.
I do not feel that this revelation spoils the book, because it could be sumised because of the Messianic nature of Paul, and because from the very begining of this book, all paths lead to a tragedy in one form or another.
Once I got over the initial depression, I realised that this book perfected the Messiah story begun in Dune, and together they make one of the best works of literature ever. I feel that the two must be considered as one story.
Book Review: Learn that the future is unwritten.
Summary: 5 Stars
The first novel ( Dune) was full of the contradictions surging from the meeting of several worlds, several philosophies and several ways of looking at the world. The Atreides are an old feudal people based on honor and self-inspired justice and righteousness. They have to free the planet of Dune of the fascistic, rotten, decaying, bloody and cruel dictatorship of the Harkonnen. They do it by sealing an alliance with the Fremen, the men of the desert. And doing that Paul, the heir of the family, creates a new religion, a new way of looking at the world, a new philosophy. In this second volume this philosophy finds its full realisation because Paul has to choose between two survivals. First he himself has to survive through death and he does it by willing to the world a pair of heirs who have all the prescient powers he had and all the rectitude the Fremen had given him. By doing that he manages to destroy the conspiration against his power and to provide his Empirium with a new generation of leaders. ...he is blind, he does not have any vision any more, so he has to give himself away to the sand worm in the desert and to become part of the whole planet, part of the whole universe. He steps into this track without any hesitation and becomes a roaming saint inspiring the whole Empirium with the philosophy of melding oneself into Nature, into natural ways, the ways of eternal Nature, this eternal Nature humans or other thinking beings can try to pervert but that always regains the upper hand. This is Fremen philosophy, and Herbert shows this choice in depth, with emotion and feeling, with passion and sensuality, with the force and strength of a new faith, the faith in the future that comes all by itself, provided there is a visionary mind that can deliver it to itself, deliver this future of Nature to Nature itself, that can deliver Mother Nature to Mother Nature herself. And this delivering becomes a crisscrossing crossroads of meanings between giving life and birth, bringing the goods of the promise, and freeing the real energy and potentiality of Nature. Herbert adds to that a marvelous sense of details that demultiplies the meaning and creates a phenomenal suspense, a fascinating interweaving of twists and surprises in the fabric of this tale. ...Book Review: Really, this is such a fine book
Summary: 5 Stars
It is the one time Frank Herbert let himself (or his editors let him) become truly literary in the series of books about Dune. It must be in the nicest sense of that term.
I remember being young, near to thirty, and reading the first time, comparing impressions with friends in the quiet, hands-on moments at our r&d work.
Perhaps we didn't feel the sweep of the original Dune, though in another way it is actually there -- behind, and in the spaces opened by many observations in the text. And it didn't seem to compare with the adventures of Leto and Ghanima and the D-wolves, though today for all that the Children of Dune book is important, it is lesser.
In Dune Messiah, the depth of individual story is drawn almost as with Asian brushes: swift, naturally spreading strokes, that you take a moment with to let the understanding come to you, how evocative. There is not summary, yet also there are summaries of whole thoughts, as in the sad ending not of Paul, but of Bijaz, whose power as a person and character just give glimpses of Frank Herbert's breadth of achievement.
I have never been able to understand the later books after Herbert died, though there can be a certain fascination in some of them, and now think that they are simply very different works, as if a very different historian had been read to us. Then there is credit where due.
Of Frank Herbert's deep and long creation, it's apparent also how he took different avenues himself, perhaps guided by editors, by 'results' for this Dune Messiah particularly. He had a life to support, and could no doubt find fun and satisfaction in putting forward what people most seemed to want to hear, all the way to Miles Teg, who was a great creation also.
Would that he could have pursued the tracks of Dune Messiah further in some places and ways, and perhaps he did -- the rest of the series I also have before me to read over. What he did here shows the soul there was behind it all, and it is a thanking matter indeed to meet him so.
Highly recommended, and as you see, for reading 'again'.