Dune Messiah: review

concept art of Jason Momoa as the ghola Hayt

[WARNING: big spoilers.]

I review the documentary "Jodorowsky's Dune" here. (2015)

I review a fan-edited alternative version of David Lynch's "Dune" here. (2020)

I review 1984's "Dune," the Lynch movie, here. (2021)

I review Denis Villeneuve's "Dune, Part 1" here. (2021)

I talk about the moviegoing experience of seeing "Part 1" here. (2021)
I review Denis Villeneuve's "Dune, Part 2" here. (2024)

It seems I've never reviewed the first novel. Hmmm.

A few days ago, I finished reading Dune Messiah. Frank Herbert's Dune came out in 1965; the sequel, Dune Messiah, came out in 1969. Like the first novel, Dune Messiah first appeared as a magazine serial before it was repackaged as a novel. It continues the story of Paul Atreides, also known as Usul, the Mahdi, Muad'Dib, the Kwisatz Haderach, the Lisan al-Gaib, etc. 

Paul is now the galactic emperor, and his Fremen have embarked on a galaxy-spanning jihad that, over a period of twelve years, has killed sixty billion people. It is a horror that Paul had tried to prevent and has trouble comprehending, and Paul realizes that with his power comes a strange powerlessness: he sees the possibilities but can do little to nothing to stop the inevitable tide of the future.

True to his word, Paul has shown his wife Irulan, daughter of the previous emperor Shaddam IV, no tenderness. He has been trying to conceive an heir with his concubine and true love Chani, but what he doesn't know is that Irulan has been has been slipping a contraceptive into Chani's food. This is part of a conspiratorial plot to overthrow Paul. The other conspirators are the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam (the formidable, metal-toothed Bene Gesserit crone from the first novel), a Tleilaxu Face Dancer named Scytale, and Edric the Guild Navigator, who also possesses enhanced prescience thanks to his over-imbibing of spice melange, the substance that allows for interstellar travel and visions of possibilities.

Scytale's people, the Bene Tleilax, are masters of cloning, cell regeneration, and gene manipulation. They can create gholas, reconstructed versions of the dead who may or may not retain memories of their previous lives; the Tleilaxu can populate the gholas' brains with new memories and knowledge, training them to live new lives and to have new purposes. One such ghola is gifted to Paul: a man named Hayt, who is the reincarnated or resurrected facsimile of Paul's old friend and mentor Duncan Idaho. The ghola retains Duncan's fighting skills, but the Bene Tleilax have also trained him to be a mentat (a human computer) and a Zensunni philosopher (we get frustratingly little Zensunni philosophy in the book). Hayt has also been subliminally programmed to kill Paul at the right moment, but he is startlingly forthright about this fact, informing Paul, almost from the moment they meet, that he has been crafted for the purpose of destroying the emperor. Paul, through his prescience, has been aware that the ghola is not a benign gift, but as the novel goes on, we begin to see that Paul's prescience has limits and can, in fact, be obscured by other prescient beings (like Edric the Guild Navigator, a mutated human who lives in a tank filled with spice gas) who are capable of creating "eddies" in future possibilities that can cloud how future events look to Paul. Paul is aware of these eddies, too, but there are some disturbances that he is unable to see through.

Helping Paul in his galactic rule is his sister Alia, a young woman now, gifted with her own powers thanks to being the unwitting recipient of the Water of Life, in the first novel, when a pregnant Lady Jessica drank the Water and converted it in her body from a poison to something harmless that the Fremen could all drink. Lady Jessica is on the Atreides homeworld of Caladan for the entirety of this story, and she plays no major role in Dune Messiah's plot except to send a caution to Alia.

Alia, meanwhile, has purposely grown a cult around herself and her brother, using religion as a way to manipulate and manage the masses. She is also an accomplished warrior. Later in the story, Paul leaves his fortress/castle in Arrakeen, capital of Arrakis/Dune, and goes to the home of an old Fedaykin commando named Otheym, who tells Paul of a Fremen conspiracy against him. This turns out to be at least partly a diversion: Otheym, who is a Fremen, is revealed to be one of the central conspirators along with Reverend Mother Mohiam, Scytale, Edric, Irulan, et al. Paul is aware enough that there is something suspicious about Otheym, but he lets this part of his prescient vision play out. Otheym gifts Paul with a prophetic dwarf named Bijaz who is also a product of the Tleilaxu. As Paul and Bijaz leave, Otheym's residence and a good chunk of the neighborhood are obliterated by a "stone burner," a nuclear device whose radiation has an affinity for human eyes. Bijaz is shielded from the blast, but Paul's eyes are burned out of their sockets, leaving him to rely on his otherworldly ability to "see" things around him, an ability that spooks everyone who witnesses it. For this reason, Paul, who is still considered a Fremen, is not sent to wander in the desert per the austere Fremen custom when someone is blinded.

Eyelessness seems to be a trope in the novel: Hayt the ghola, as he wrestles with the idea that he may very well still be Duncan Idaho in some real sense, also lacks human eyes: his eyes, of Tleilaxu make like his body, are metal and robotic—creepily inhuman. Hayt is also falling in love with Alia, and she and Paul both are aware that there is some sort of conspiracy against them even if they don't know its exact nature. But one advantage Paul has, which doesn't pay off until almost the very end of the book, is that he is immune to the glamor of Scytale the Tleilaxu Face Dancer. A Face Dancer, like the Faceless Men of A Song of Ice and Fire, can change form and voice, becoming a different person at will. Scytale uses this ability to gain access to Paul on several occasions, but Paul never lets on that he can easily "see" through Scytale's disguises. Scytale suffers an unpleasant fate once he learns that Paul has seen through him this entire time. The other core members of the conspiracy against Paul are also, in the end, rounded up and executed, but not at Paul's behest: it's his sister Alia who, against Paul's wishes, does away with the throne's enemies. Of the conspirators, only Irulan survives, and despite being Bene Gesserit-trained, she renounces her allegiance to the sisterhood.

As the book ends, Chani gives birth to twins after Paul's vision shows only a daughter being born, but the struggle to overcome the contraceptives proves too much, and Chani dies in childbirth. Hayt the ghola is subliminally triggered to try to kill Paul the moment Paul mutters "She is gone," but Hayt overrides his conditioning and, in doing so, recovers Duncan Idaho's memories, essentially becoming Duncan in full. Paul manages to slay Scytale while Hayt slays the dwarf Bijaz, who was also a part of the conspiracy against the Atreides family—an evil "gift" from the treacherous Otheym, whose machinations come to nothing. With all of Paul's enemies dead, Paul is left truly blind, so he at last follows the sacred Fremen tradition of exiling himself into the desert. This is a victory of sorts: Paul has effectively navigated the rough river of possibilities and changed the tide of galactic history. Alia will continue to rule the empire, and Paul's children, Leto and Ghanima, will be cared for by the Fremen as Paul himself passes into legend. Princess Irulan, Paul's wife, has rejected the plotting of the Bene Gesserit sisterhood, and she vows to become the tutor and caretaker of Paul's children.

Dune Messiah isn't the magisterial work that Dune was, but I found it readable, especially as I think about what shape the next Denis Villeneuve movie will take. Lady Jessica plays almost no role in the story, so there won't be much for Rebecca Ferguson to do, but Duncan Idaho, called Hayt for most of the story, has a major role, so it will be interesting to see Jason Momoa brought back to play the ghola, with those unsettlingly metallic eyes. Alia also has a large role in the story, and "Dune, Part 2" establishes Anya Taylor-Joy in the role. The Alia in Dune Messiah is probably barely sixteen years old, though, so it's a bit creepy to imagine a romance between Alia and Hayt/Duncan. Of course, everything about Hayt/Duncan is creepy. This role, in which Hayt is literally Paul's frenemy, will be a major acting challenge for Momoa, who normally approaches his roles with a kind of brawny enthusiasm. It will be interesting to see how Momoa interprets something as complex as deep internal conflict.

One of the major themes of Dune Messiah, aside from Don't trust messiahs, is the idea that the powerful are, in truth, impotent. This is a theme that comes out in many other stories. Near and dear to my heart are the first two Chronicles of Thomas Covenant The Unbeliever, which I've talked about before. In those high-fantasy trilogies, there is a long-running discussion of what it means to be a god who must live and act according to unbreakable ontological strictures. The Creator, in these trilogies, cannot act directly against the Despiser, who is the story's cast-down Devil-figure, locked inside creation. While the Despiser wreaks havoc on the Creator's creation, the best the Creator can do is send a champion from "our" world and tell him nothing—because to give the champion any information is to prejudice him, thereby taking away his own freedom, and only a fully free individual has any chance of defeating the Despiser. In Dune Messiah, Paul finds himself imprisoned within the skein of possibilities that he is able to see, and this very awareness both blinds him and keeps him from acting in certain ways. I've heard similar discussions, in the political realm, about how the US president is often called "the most powerful man in the free world," but he is, in many ways, hamstrung and constrained by all the forces arrayed against him, all the inertia of a very old and established power structure.

Dune Messiah is now, thanks to Denis Villeneuve's plan to make the third film of a promised trilogy, required reading for people interested in the "Dune-iverse." I found the novel to be well paced but, strangely, not nearly as deeply philosophical as the first novel was. Part of the problem may not even be the novel's fault: Dune, the first novel, laid the groundwork for most of the concepts, events, characters, etc. that populate and enliven this universe, and the price we readers pay for that is how familiar so much of the second book is. There are enough new characters and plots and subplots to keep Dune Messiah interesting, and there are definitely some deep themes at play throughout the story. Still, the overall effect is that Dune Messiah is, as sequels go, a lesser work, partly because it's familiar. And it's a smaller-scale story: almost all of the novel's plot takes place in Arrakeen. Is it a worthwhile read? Yes, but at the same time, I'd heard warnings that the books after Dune got increasingly weirder, and after reading Dune Messiah, I can see that weirdness coming. Herbert wrote his first two Dune novels in the 1960s, with its prominent drug culture, which at least partially explains the central role of the psychedelically mind-enhancing spice melange in the story. I can only imagine that the tenor of the books must have changed as a reflection of the times, though. I know that, in later books, young Leto ends up somehow bonding with a sandworm and ruling the empire for thousands of years before being destroyed and breaking up into millions of little creatures, each possessing a fragment of his consciousness, while humanity enjoys true independence and a wide-open destiny for the first time in centuries. So: knowing all of this, do I stop with Dune Messiah, or do I forge ahead to Children of Dune? For the moment, the best answer I can give is that I want to take a break from this universe. I might return to it later.