Simpler than it seems: Dune

(The last part of a series on Dune. Read parts 1, 2, and 3.)

I finished Dune over the weekend. It's a great book, put over the top by Frank Herbert's narrative execution and brilliant worldbuilding. It has the reputation of being complex, but in fact the plot is very straightforward.

Consider the second act. You could sum it up in a few sentences: Paul and Jessica flee into the deep desert. Stilgar finds them. A jealous tribesman challenges Paul to a duel, and Paul kills him. In a public ritual, Jessica assumes the role of Reverend Mother of the Fremen. Paul is confirmed as the Fremen messiah and takes Chani as his concubine.

This story segment fills the better part of 160 pages, and it moves straight as an arrow. There are no twists or turns, and only brief setbacks. Paul and Jessica gain Stilgar's countenance after a quick demonstration of their fighting abilities. The rivalry with Jamis develops instantly. Same with the romance with Chani. The complexity comes with all the stuff Herbert hangs on the elemental plot: the oppressive environment, Paul's hyper-awareness, the Fremen's mercenary culture, the politics of tribal leadership, the scarcity of water, and the Fremen ambition to change Arrakis's surface. This is why people universally praise Dune. It's utterly engrossing. Strip all that stuff I mentioned away, and you're left with a story about a boy who loses his inheritance but finds something much greater. That summary would suffice for a thousand different stories.

Here are some final observations on how Herbert crafted such a great book:

• Irulan's interludes. I briefly mentioned Irulan in part 1 of my analysis, but she deserves special focus, for Herbert uses her to great effect. He separates each chapter with an excerpt from Irulan's writings about Paul, House Atreides, or her father the emperor. These excerpts are written in the fullness of time, after Irulan's political marriage to Paul at the end of the book.
  
  The excerpts serve many purposes. They reinforce the omniscient narrative and the theme of prescience, where the present and the future are known. Always apropos of what's to come, the excerpts set expectations for every chapter. If you're picking up the book for the first time in a few days, they're a good primer for jumping back into the story. Or, if you're reading straight through, they reorient you to the larger narrative. In that sense they are a framing device, approaching the book's material from a historical perspective. Few stories lend themselves to multiple interpretations; even fewer do it within the text. This encourages the reader to think deeply about this fictional universe, boosting its verisimilitude.


• Time jump. Two years pass between acts 2 and 3. Herbert signals this time jump with a clever bit of expositional dialogue disguised as the Baron Harkonnen berating the captain of his guard. You can infer most of what happened during this 2-year interval from the narrative momentum established in act 2, which took place over barely 3 days. Such a long jump after a dense section of the story was a bold creative choice. It serves the story well. Two years is long enough for Paul to attain mythical status among the Fremen. His speech is different: plain, direct, and formal. He's become a father, a brother, and a tribal and spiritual leader. His stature exceeds even Stilgar's, to the extent that Stilgar brooks no argument when Paul orders him around.
  
  Our sense of time is that it stretches over major events. Paul and Jessica's first days hiding in the desert and joining the Fremen should occupy disproportionate narrative space. What would be the point of sprinkling bridge scenes in the 2 years after Paul's confirmation as the Fremen messiah? The story does not need narrative support at this juncture. What it needs is an ending, and Herbert spends the first scenes of act 3 putting the pieces in place for the ending to happen.


• The Chosen One trope. Paul's story is a series of rites of passage. The gom jabbar, his abrupt ascent to Duke, the fight against Jamis, his confirmation as the Fremen messiah, riding a sand worm, etc. Throughout, Paul fulfills specific prophecies about the Kwisatz Haderach and the Lisan al-Gaib. The Fremen in particular are intent on these prophecies and whisper them when he does something strange yet expected. As a Christian, I can't help but see deliberate parallels to the Gospel accounts of Jesus fulfilling the law and the prophets. Even how the Harkonnens dismiss this new religion while it percolates under their noses evokes the decadent Roman Empire during the Church's expansion.
  
  There is dramatic poetry in the way Herbert rolls this out. The Fremen prophecies come from the Missionary Protectiva, the pseudo-religion seeded across the galaxy by the Bene Gesserit to prepare the way for the Kwisatz Haderach. The Bene Gesserit want to control the Kwisatz Haderach, and control the Fremen through this religion. But Paul turns that expectation on its head. The Kwisatz Haderach makes his home among the Fremen. He empowers them in revolt against the Harkonnens, and they become his foot soldiers in a jihad (holy war) that subjugates the galaxy. Paul spends much of the third act fretting over this, but he can't avoid it, either in life or by death.
  
  I cannot overstate how well Herbert executes this trope. It pulls everything, on all narrative levels, into a cohesive whole. Without it, the stakes and the drama would fall flat.


• Managing the cast. Dune has a big cast of characters, and some of them come in for only one or two scenes. Duncan Idaho is in three scenes and dies offscreen. The Beast Rabban is in one scene and dies offscreen. Count Fenring is in two scenes. After the first act, Thufir Hawat is in three scenes. The emperor does not show up until there's 30 pages left in the book! Irulan is present for only the last scene; I can't remember if she has any spoken lines. I highlight this because, despite the large cast of characters, Herbert doesn't overwhelm you by giving them all prominent voices. You can have characters who are important to the functioning of the plot without making them major characters. The two major characters are Paul and Jessica. Leading supporters are Gurney Halleck and Baron Harkonnen. Everyone else is secondary at best.
  
  That being said, it's impressive how secondary characters loom largely over the plot. Herbert's tight narrative is structured around scenes, with the featured characters talking often about the other characters. This keeps the active background of the story ever present in the reader's mind. Hawat, in service to the Harkonnens after Yueh's betrayal, figures prominently in the Baron's and Feyd-Rautha's machinations. But we see him only twice after the Harkonnens capture him. Herbert was confident enough in the character he established in the first act to rest on those laurels. The key to making this work is character consistency. It was another bold choice that paid off.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. If you like hard sci-fi, check out my books Seeds of Calamity and Tendrils to the Moon. You can find extended previews for each here and here.