Few would deny that Dune is a "great read," as Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is a "great read." It gives us strongly defined heroes and villains, engages us in an action which is simple in essence but full of events, twists, complications. Dune and its sequel, Dune Messiah, first appeared as serial fiction, and they exhibit the frequent climaxes and moments of great suspense which the serial format requires. Dune is a romance of adventure, and it is not my intention here to suggest that this romance hides great speculative profundities. What makes it exceptional is the systematic way in which the narrational events are imbedded in a particular ecological setting, and the thoughtfulness and delicacy that have gone into the major characterizations. By choosing as his main location a planet that is naturally a desert, Herbert has alloted the ecosystem a major role in structuring his narrative. And he has developed this role with a wonderful rigor and attention to detail.
This is one great strength of Dune. Another is in Herbert's attention to the mechanisms by which religious and political "greatness" are achieved. The imaginary sands of Dune owe a good deal to the real sands of Arabia, and somewhere behind this novel stands T. E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom, in which Lawrence speculated on the curious propensity of the semitic geography for producing prophets and mystics. Paul Atreides, who becomes the religious leader Muad'Dib, finds himself cast for the role of prophet in a holy war…. Herbert is saved from operating at the adventure story level—saved by a greater ability to transfer something of actual political maneuvering into narrative form, and to an even greater extent saved by his ability to characterize Paul as a young man who knows that he has been cast for a role, that he is enacting a myth with which he is not entirely in sympathy. Like the comic-mythic heroes of John Barth's Chimera, Paul Atreides has a powerful sense of the artificiality in his own situation. But where Barth's bumbling heroes struggle to enact their mythic roles fittingly, forcing us to laugh at their comic ineptitude, Paul simply takes a sardonic attitude toward "greatness" and tries to ride the mythic whirlwind and tame it for the sake of the people on his adopted planet.
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