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justinh94 's review for:
Dune Messiah
by Frank Herbert
I’m so glad that I returned to this sequel in my spice hangover from Dune: Part Two, since I appreciated Herbert’s deceptively ambitious follow-up to his masterpiece much more upon a re-read. What scanned as an intentionally elusive subversion of Dune’s thrilling expanses on first pass was unlocked for me this second time as the only natural answer to the questions its predecessor asks.
In both the book and the movies, Dune is a thrilling, steady crescendo, accumulating peoples and powers and prescience with seemingly infinite momentum until we’re left on a crest that seems to peer out at eternity. The trick of Messiah is that it peers through all that momentum to its unstable core, recognizing the impossible architecture of so many greedy hypotheticals and answering it with the only plausible outcome: implosion.
Rather than attempting to outdo himself by logically justifying increasingly improbable superschemes, Herbert takes Paul to his (very extreme) limits in order to prove the limits time places on even the most extreme powers. It’s an even headier ride than Dune, trading that book’s relatively classical adventures for the weirder lands most stories never reach, but it finds an odd kind of hope out in that cosmic desert. This too shall pass; even the gnarliest sandstorm will eventually dissipate, leaving the possibility for something better to spring up from its dust.
(Copying my initial review from September of 2021 below, for posterity):
In its tone and in its (relative) brevity, this feels less like a sequel to Dune and more like an epilogue. With nearly none of the action or scope of the first and at least twice the amount of insular throne room politics and existential head-trips, we’re clearly here to drill inwards, not expand farther. Don’t get me wrong: I loved those aspects of the first book, and they still work here - I just loved them more in counterbalance with the visceral, planet-spanning parts. The majority of this book’s scenes take place inside Paul’s palace (if not inside his head), and while Denis Villeneuve wrestles with containing Dune’s vast sprawl within the frame of two mega blockbusters, Dune Messiah could very well be staged as a three-act play - and a relatively inexpensive one, at that.
Still, Frank Herbert’s singularity of vision is undeniable, and even as he sands Paul’s story (and all of time’s) down to a narrow footbridge, we’re inclined to follow along. With these two novels, Herbert created a world so rich and lived-in that it’s still a pleasure to luxuriate even in this one little corner of it. And if this is him funneling Dune’s endless desert into a more manageable pile of sand for 300 pages, he leaves just enough of an open-ended pebble trail at the end to believe it might be starting to build up into a desert all anew. Either way, he’s got me on the hook to find out.
(P.S. I’m ecstatically excited to watch Denis’ attempt to wrangle Dune. I think even if Dune and the hypothetical second film were to gross 500 billion dollars each, they still wouldn’t even try to take on this one… and they’d probably be right!)
In both the book and the movies, Dune is a thrilling, steady crescendo, accumulating peoples and powers and prescience with seemingly infinite momentum until we’re left on a crest that seems to peer out at eternity. The trick of Messiah is that it peers through all that momentum to its unstable core, recognizing the impossible architecture of so many greedy hypotheticals and answering it with the only plausible outcome: implosion.
Rather than attempting to outdo himself by logically justifying increasingly improbable superschemes, Herbert takes Paul to his (very extreme) limits in order to prove the limits time places on even the most extreme powers. It’s an even headier ride than Dune, trading that book’s relatively classical adventures for the weirder lands most stories never reach, but it finds an odd kind of hope out in that cosmic desert. This too shall pass; even the gnarliest sandstorm will eventually dissipate, leaving the possibility for something better to spring up from its dust.
(Copying my initial review from September of 2021 below, for posterity):
In its tone and in its (relative) brevity, this feels less like a sequel to Dune and more like an epilogue. With nearly none of the action or scope of the first and at least twice the amount of insular throne room politics and existential head-trips, we’re clearly here to drill inwards, not expand farther. Don’t get me wrong: I loved those aspects of the first book, and they still work here - I just loved them more in counterbalance with the visceral, planet-spanning parts. The majority of this book’s scenes take place inside Paul’s palace (if not inside his head), and while Denis Villeneuve wrestles with containing Dune’s vast sprawl within the frame of two mega blockbusters, Dune Messiah could very well be staged as a three-act play - and a relatively inexpensive one, at that.
Still, Frank Herbert’s singularity of vision is undeniable, and even as he sands Paul’s story (and all of time’s) down to a narrow footbridge, we’re inclined to follow along. With these two novels, Herbert created a world so rich and lived-in that it’s still a pleasure to luxuriate even in this one little corner of it. And if this is him funneling Dune’s endless desert into a more manageable pile of sand for 300 pages, he leaves just enough of an open-ended pebble trail at the end to believe it might be starting to build up into a desert all anew. Either way, he’s got me on the hook to find out.
(P.S. I’m ecstatically excited to watch Denis’ attempt to wrangle Dune. I think even if Dune and the hypothetical second film were to gross 500 billion dollars each, they still wouldn’t even try to take on this one… and they’d probably be right!)