DUNE BOOK CLUB :: The End! [Spoilers Should Be Presumed]
"How little the universe knows about the nature of real cruelty."
Even as Paul "Muad'Dib" Atreides is poised at the lip of his own final ascendancy, he is again revealed to be just another part of the system of systems on Dune. Though he strand an emperor and his retinue on his planet, lead an army of sandworms riding Fremen through a ruptured Shield Wall, even dare the spice trance to become the prophesied Kwisatz Haderach, still his own baby is killed in a chance raid. To my mind, from this point onward, both throughout the climax of this novel and in its sequels, Paul Atreides becomes little more than an automaton, grappling and failing with his own prescience, with his own awareness of his locked-in place in his system.
As I said at the beginning of our merry Book Club, the best parts of Dune to me are about systems, whether they be systems of people, systems of politics, systems of ecology, or systems of systems themselves. The book is not perfect, far from it; and when it strays, it strays widely. It's almost as if, wanting to write about the IDEAS of Dune, Frank Herbert spared little time to consider some of the characters and their part in the story. For example, the part near the end where we are led to believe that the Count Fenring could have killed Paul had he chosen; as if the idea of the leader of a newly victorious army submitting to single combat wasn't preposterous enough, we should believe that his army would stand by while an even-more dangerous opponent were arranged for?
Dune is my favorite novel, although I would never say it was the best-written novel I've ever read, maybe not even close. But it's the novel that has always excited my imagination most--not only do I still feel transported when Paul is standing on the Shield Wall gazing down on the Emperor's ships in the plain of Arrakeen, but I still can feel my brain churning over the many many MANY ideas packed into the novel. While a book like The Great Gatsby or Crime and Punishment might excite me as an intellectual, Dune excites me as a HUMAN; it excites the part of me that is optimistic, that believes that humans are capable of true greatness. It excites the part of me that believes the IDEA is the important part, and all the rest is just artificing.
Where Dune--and indeed, much sci-fi--breaks down is in the meeting between these ideas and the necessity to decant them to the reader. While Dune does work best when it's more about its characters than its more fantastical elements, the finale of the book attempts to tie up a lot of plotlines through the convenient device of just gathering all the remaining characters into a room and then killing some of them and having others give speeches.
above, by Warren Craghead
After chapter upon chapter of Thufir Hawat's machinations within the Harkonnen family, he just sort of expires after reaffirming his loyalty to Paul. The Baron himself is dead at the start of the climax, and everyone else--Gurney, Jessica, Stilgar--just sort of stand around for the denouement. Which is a big knife fight. When I first ready the book as a teenager, I was like "hmm, that's weird, didn't see that coming." Today it sticks out like a sore thumb. All the menace and portent of Paul's "the nature of real cruelty" moment are drained away for me by this climax. The very idea that the Emperor and an entire universe of CHOAM businessmen could be convinced that "well I guess there's nothing for it but to make the dude Emperor" is just insane.
This may be one of the things the movie did better--I haven't seen it in a million years, but I know when I bring up Dune to friends (most of whom have never read it), the two things they say, doing impersonations from the movie, are "He IS the Kwisatz Haderach!" and "The spice must flow!" But in the book, I don't think a strong case is ever made for the spice as an irreplaceable quantity--while we see Guildsmen from time to time, it's only ever briefly, and there's really no sense as to the sense of terror they might have that something might interrupt their access to spice. Surely not enough to allow someone to maneuver his way into ultimate control of... well, everything?
I was explaining Stranger In A Strange Land (another great sci-fi book) to someone the other day. "It's an amazing book, it's really almost a religious text, about a man with amazing powers who becomes a sort of Messiah." Then I added, "You just have to get past the idea that he was raised by Martians." Most great sci-fi (to me, to me) is an idea so huge that you need to place it in a fantastic setting so that it can work. But what often prevents good, even great sci-fi from being true literature is this same fantastic setting, which robs the book of some of its impact, some of its relevance to the world which WE live in.
But I would hazard that Dune is and will always be among the very greatest of sci-fi novels--even with its inconsistencies and warts, the ambitious scope of the book's ideas is still flabbergasting. Not to mention the incisive, almost prophetic understanding Herbert has for sociology and ecology. And, my favorite of all, of humanism, of the potential of regular human beings for true greatness.