A review by frasersimons
Chapterhouse: Dune by Frank Herbert

3.0

This was almost a 4 star book for me. The nice thing is that everything has to be explained this time, and in a very real way it works as a counterbalance to the very first Dune book.

The through line, Those That Do Not Know History Are Doomed To Repeat It, is predominate (finally) and you can really see in hindsight the overall structural accomplishment of the meta plot, which is really, really satisfying for me. When you aren’t stuck in each books A plot, which I felt were all fairly simplistic and widely varying in quality, you do see the accomplishment and overarching principles Herbert was actually to communicate. Things like Preserving actual history; the larger, sort of movements of humanity interrogates as an entity; the terror of living a life from a singular viewpoint because we simply can’t know what we don’t know, and how what we now call Motivated Thinking can be applied to every faction and component that comprise these overall movements of mankind are also divorced from moral absolutism.

Yet, these larger concepts are also really frustrating because in order to get these things you still have to experience plots that are by necessity myopic. And within these smaller frameworks there are antiquated notions like genre and sexuality and things we know about socialization and various other aspects of identity that clash against the various human civilizations. Even when the narrative tries to celebrate women it does so in a sexist way. That’s probably a product of the time it was written in. It’s nice to think that Herbert would have written it differently had all the science of today been available; had even the Internet been a thing to utilize for such a sprawling epic.

But it wasn’t. And as a result, within this plot and all the others, there’s a hobbling of suspension of the necessary suspension of disbelief for sci-fi stories to work. It’s their buttressing. And it isn’t present here; sometimes bordering on the comical. People bonding forever to each other because they fuck, for instance, feels antiquated as hell, engineered for each other or not. Terminology and names and the actual array of time and space similarly feels like it’s devoid of technological progress and birth rates; essentially anything that isn’t in service to the larger concepts is more-or-less handwaved. The only buttressing here is those things Herbert was expressing and believed to be true regarding people, as a whole.

If you can get past that then each individual story has some merit and I was able to appreciate each. The culmination of the previous book especially was what brought me to the meeting of my expectations threshold here. It’s an open ended send off, sure. But it does finish the larger context and humanization of each necessary viewpoint. And for once, a lot actually happens and it is maybe the only book that doesn’t feel devoid of context from the empire or surrounding worlds. The dialogue is still a bit melodramatic for my taste, but it felt more tight to me. Pacing felt better than the previous; miles better than God Emperor.

Overall, I liked it for what it said about the philosophical underpinnings and larger mechanizations, which is how I’ve felt every single book. And thinking back on the entire series, to be honest, the moment that had stuck with me the most is one from the very first book, despite the fact that I actually might like Messiah the most out of all of them.

“I knew Jamis. He taught me that when you kill, you pay for it…”