It’s Dune. It’s aged surprisingly well. It has a lot to say about the world of today on the verge of collapse due to the destruction of our climate, poorly thought through technology, rampant late capitalism and the ever enticing venus flytrap of ideology.

“We mustn’t run short of filmbase,” the Duke said. “Else, how could we flood village and city with our information? The people must learn how well I govern them. How would they know if we didn’t tell them?”

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Having watched both David Lynch’s Dune and Denis Villeneuve’s Dune Part One, I feel like although both are interesting and good in their own way (yes, even the David Lynch movie), Dune is a story best told as a novel, by adapting Dune into a movie you lose a lot of what makes Dune interesting.

Maybe if Jodorowsky had been able to achieve his vision of a 15 hour long movie adaptation of Dune, I’d feel differently… but here we are.

What makes Frank Herbert’s Dune novel so special for me? Well, it’s a few things. The concerns present in the text (environmental, technological, late capitalism-related, ideological) have only become more relevant in the decades since the novel was written.

The novel is by no means perfect and one could argue that Denis Villeneuve’s movie is a better and more cohesive “product” compared to the novel. But Denis Villeneuve’s movie suffers from being a big budget movie that has to condense and drop many of the more interesting parts of the novel and whitewash or completely remove the novel’s more subversive ideas.

Another part of the novel that I enjoy quite a bit which isn’t present in the movies is Frank Herbert’s mastery of the shifting POV. Multiple POV characters is not anything new to me, almost every single novel I read has multiple POV characters. Dune is different because it has an omniscient narrator that dives deep into the psyche of each of the characters it’s focusing on, showing the reader their inner thoughts and concerns while also smoothly flowing from one character to the next within the same chapter, even the same paragraph.

One thought remained to him. [POV Character 1] saw it in formless light on rays of black: The day the flesh shapes and the flesh the day shapes. The thought struck him with a sense of fullness he knew he could never explain.

Silence.

[POV Character 2] stood with his back against his private door, his own bolt hole behind the table. He had slammed it on a room full of dead men. His senses took in guards swarming around him. Did I breathe it? he asked himself.

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I’m not too surprised why this is rarely done today. It must be hard to do well and even when done well it’s much harder for the reader to follow. It seems as though a lot of readers today, perhaps this has always been true, skim through the texts they read. You can’t skim through a text like Dune and expect to understand what’s going on at all times because of the constantly switching focus of the omniscient narrator.

Are there any problems with Frank Herbert’s Dune? Absolutely. The one issue that stands out to me is the introduction of Feyd-Rautha in the last quarter of the book. Unlike every other character in the novel who is introduced early on and built upon throughout the text, Feyd-Rautha shows up out of nowhere and we’re expected to care about his bullshit.

I wonder if this discrepancy comes from Dune’s initial publication as a two-part serial? I don’t know but it doesn’t work for me. Feyd-Rautha should have been introduced way earlier which would have given the reader more time to build the character up in their minds before the final confrontation with him at the end of the novel.

I’m in love with Dune and I’m committed to reading through its sequel Dune Messiah next. If I enjoy that, I’ll likely be taking a look at Children of Dune sooner than later.

PS: Special mention to Brian Herbert, Frank Herbert’s son. Reading through Brian’s afterword to Dune and his foreword to the sequel Dune Messiah brought me a lot of joy because of how childish, clownish and delusional Brian Herbert seems to be.

As if whispering in his own ear, Frank Herbert constantly reminded himself that he was mortal. If he had been a politician, he would have undoubtedly been an honorable one, perhaps even one of our greatest U.S. presidents.

p. xi

Also, Brian Herbert is clearly someone who does not understand what made his father’s work resonate so widely and the fact that the “Dune” torch was passed down to him is truly sad. What a clown hehe.