This would be the part of a typical review where I'd put a summary paragraph explaining the narrative. I surely don't need me to do that for Dune, right? Maybe you've never read it, or maybe like me, you read it once and forgot the particulars -- but Dune is one of those things that has pervaded pop culture like spice in a Fremen diet. You know the gist, right?
It would be hard to overstate Frank Herbert's accomplishment in the world building of Dune. It's as sweeping an effort as J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, perhaps not as widely appreciated only because science fiction was more well established a genre at the time Herbert wrote Dune than fantasy was when Tolkien burst onto the scene. Dune is a template for taking a "what if?" scenario and building everything around it with thoughtful, honest logic. Herbert thinks of everything: technology, religion, politics, history, commerce, and more. It's a world that has captured many readers' imaginations because it's created with such integrity.
Herbert also peppered a good deal of real world research into his fiction. Many of the customs and terms are inspired by Middle Eastern cultures -- which far fewer people would have been aware of when the book was first published in 1965. This far future is made more intriguing for the ways it projects from non-Western influences, and it hints at how much research Herbert did before sitting down to write.
All that said, the universe of Dune impresses me far more than other aspects of the book. The pacing of the narrative is slow to support all that world building, and often at the expense of any driving action. Dune is divided into three sections, the first as long as the other two combined -- and the story doesn't really "get going" until near the end of that first, sprawling section. Key aspects of the story transpire "off screen," both at a character level (uh... 50-year-old spoilers: Paul Atriedes has and loses a son we never actually meet in person) and at a broader narrative level (when the much-anticipated battle to retake the city finally comes, we skip over everything after the opening volley).
Characters don't seem to have nearly the amount of thought behind them as the setting does. Much is made of the moment Paul kills for the "first time"... ignoring the fact that he killed someone several chapters earlier in the novel. Baron Harkonnen's evil scheming, meant to show a wheels-within-wheels level of sophistication, doesn't really stand up to even the slightest bit of analytical thinking. Character motivations are rarely revealed subtly, through their actions; everyone instead voices their inner thoughts in pervasive italicized sentences (which inspired the unintentionally humorous voice-overs of the David Lynch film adaptation).
It's possible here that I'm looking for a level of sophistication in the writing here that simply didn't exist in 1965. Without question, writers have improved a lot in the last few decades -- many of them by building on what giants before them, like Herbert, set up. But I suppose I feel conditioned to expect great writing in this case, because the world building that underpins it is at a level that still holds up completely today.
Dune leaves me with two quite different and distinct reactions. Reconciling them together somehow is tricky -- but if I had to reduce it all to a single grade, it would be a B-. Dune is well worth reading, but it's a slog at times. I feel like I understand why it keeps getting adapted every 20 years or so: there's great material to work with here, and plenty of room to think that a skillful interpretation could improve it immensely. Hopefully they will pull that off with the film version coming at the end of this year.
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