“The flesh surrenders itself, he thought. Eternity takes back its own. Our bodies stirred these waters briefly, danced with a certain intoxication before the love of life and self, dealt with a few strange ideas, then submitted to the instruments of Time. What can we say of this? I occurred. I am not…yet, I occurred.”

Dune Messiah continues the story of Paul Atredeis, now known by the Fremen inhabitants of Arrakis as Muad’dib. Set about a decade after the original, the hero of the first novel is now Emperor of the universe and wielding incalculable amounts of power. In many series, the second book tries to offer what the first did, except more of it. But Dune Messiah is different than its predecessor, serving simultaneously as a kind of transitional postlude to Dune and a prologue the third book in the series, Children of Dune. As such is much more sedate and brooding, and less epic than its predecessor.

Certainly, readers of this book should have first treated themselves to the first book in the series before embarking on this one—to learn the characters, places, politics, etc.—but comparing the two is not really fair. The first book stands on its own as a pinnacle of the genre, and the second sets the stage as Herbert looks to expand his ideas into a series, and so should not really be viewed strictly as a standalone novel. And as a step in the direction of the grand path of Herbert’s vision, it does its job well, in some respects surpassing its predecessor. It is simply the case that the first book in any series has a chance to have complete cohesion in a way that a sequel does not due to its inherent reliance on the first book. (In cases where subsequent books in a series are written to be readable as standalones, they often suffer from redundancy when read in succession.)

While nothing can replace the wonder a reader experiences when discovering Arrakis for the first time, Dune Messiah offers its own unique contributions to the series. Where the first book tracked Paul’s quest for vengeance and his rise to power, we now explore his efforts in managing the empire. Despite his awesome power, he is unable to quell the excesses of his religious uprising, which has led to the deaths of billions, and a ruthless conspiracy mounts against him.

The book opens with an interrogation between a Fremen priest and an Ixian historian named Bronso who has been sentenced to death for heresy for accurately recording a history of Muad’dib. Though Paul is powerful, he is incapable of controlling the superfluous religious proliferation and excess that his uprising has caused. Despite this, his vision tells him that he is still steering humanity on the correct route. It is here that Paul sets humanity on the Golden Path—a mystical route of great peril and complexity that will guide humanity into the future, avoiding extinction or stagnation.

Just as in Dune, Messiah opens each chapter with an epigraph. The first one here (coming after the interrogation of the historian) sets the stage for the now-deified Atreides siblings. Right from the start, if the title wasn’t enough of a religious reference, we are being influenced to read the events with a foresight of the mythology that will grow around the Fremen savior.

Such a rich store of myths enfolds Paul Muad’dib, the Mentat Emperor, and his sister, Alia, it is difficult to see the real persons behind these veils. But there were, after all, a man born Paul Atreides and a woman born Alia. Their flesh was subject to space and time. And even though their oracular powers placed them beyond the usual limits of time and space, they came from human stock. They experienced real events which left real traces upon a real universe. To understand them, it must be seen that their catastrophe was the catastrophe of all mankind. This work is dedicated, then, not to Muad’dib or his sister, but to their heirs—to all of us.
–Dedication in the Muad’dib Concordance as copied from The Tabla Memorium of the Mahdi Spirit Cult

Several minor characters in the first book take larger roles here. In the first book, Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV’s daughter, Irulan, had only a minimal role in the plot, though excerpts from her writings served as preludes to each chapter. Paul’s concubine Chani and Irulan both have fleshed out personalities that allow for interesting dynamics to develop. As Jessica had told Chani in Dune, when Paul demanded to marry Irulan for political reasons: “[…] that princess will have the name, yet she’ll live as less than a concubine—never to know a moment of tenderness from the man to whom she’s bound. While we, Chani, we who carry the name of concubine—history will call us wives.” Paul’s sister Alia—exposed to the myriad memories of previous Reverend Mothers when her mother Jessica underwent the spice agony while pregnant—has become a Reverend Mother herself at the age of fifteen, respected but feared by the disciples of Muad’dib and her fellow members of the Bene Gesserit.

The first book gave us a rich and complex universe, and in Messiah we get to explore some of the cultures and religious orders that were mentioned in the first book: the Bene Gesserit—the political, religious and societal force that trains its adherents with strict mental conditioning such that their psychic prowess is seen as magical by outsiders; the Spacing Guild—a typically apolitical organization with monopolies in interstellar space travel and banking which utilizes spice-enhanced navigators to guide their ships at lightspeed; the Tleilaxu—an isolationist society boasting technological advancements such as artificial eyes and clones and offering these products for sale. These three factions enter into a conspiracy to overthrow Paul.

The sisterhood of the Bene Gesserit had given Irulan training as a young woman, in hopes that she would one day be in a position of power, such as she is now. Though she remained a novice in many of their methods, she is nevertheless a useful instrument for them now, as they retaliate to the loss of control over their long-awaited Kwitsatz Haderach. Also present is Scytale, a Bene Tleilaxu Face Dancer, who regrets the death and misery the conspiracy plans to bring—a sentiment he hides from the others. Mutated by extended spice saturation, the Guild Navigator Edric floats in a large tank of melange gas, his elongated body and finned extremities contained in a dome constructed by the Bene Gesserit specifically for the meeting. Rounding out the small band of strategists is the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam, whose input is cynical and cautionary: “When you think you have him skewered, right then you’ll find him unwounded.”

The Atreides dynasty is in jeopardy because Paul has failed to produce an heir—he will not touch his wife Irulan, who has been secretly administering contraceptives to his concubine Chani. Known to Paul, he allows Irulan’s intervention because in his prescience he sees that the birth of his heir will result in Chani’s death—though she eventually conceives by switching to an ancient Fremen diet. Paul’s prescience does not make him omniscient, nor can he simply change what he sees. He tries to explain this to Stilgar, who believes him to be godlike.

“The uninitiated try to conceive of prescience as obeying a Natural Law. […] But it’d be just as correct to say it’s heaven speaking to us, that being able to read the future is a harmonious act of man’s being. In other words, prediction is a natural consequence in the wave of the present. It wears the guise of nature, you see. But such powers cannot be used from an attitude that prestates aims and purposes. Does a chip caught in the wave say where it’s going? There’s no cause and effect in the oracle. Causes become occasions of convections and confluences, places where the currents meet. Accepting prescience, you fill your being with concepts repugnant to the intellect. Your intellectual consciousness, therefore, rejects them. In rejecting, intellect becomes a part of the processes, and is subjugated.”

Knowing that Paul cannot see everything, we are led to understand that somehow the navigator Edric—himself moderately prescient in his navigational abilities—is able to interfere such that Paul cannot glimpse the details of the conspiracy. The Spacing Guild presents Paul with a gift—a ghola of Paul’s former friend and teacher Duncan Idaho, dead since the attack that had also taken Paul’s father from him. The ghola is named Hayt, and has been trained as a Mentat. Paul tentatively accepts the gift, believing their may be a way to awaken the memories of the original Duncan Idaho in this lab-grown clone of his loyal friend. As a result of this, Paul’s reputation suffers among the Fremen who distrust the creations of the Tleilaxu.

The conspiracy lures Paul into a trap where a Tleilaxu atomic weapon explodes, blinding Paul and many others. By Fremen custom, a blind man is to be abandoned in the desert. However, Paul’s oracular abilities allow him to prove that he can still see, thus solidifying his godhead, though some Fremen make gestures to ward off evil spirits when Paul displays his ability to see without eyes. His visions so closely match reality that by rigidly following his oracular vision, he can keep in lock-step with reality. Though he can maintain his appearance of sight without eyes, he cannot stray from the path that he envisions or change even the smallest detail of what is to come, or else he would truly be at the mercy of his physical blindness. A tender scene plays out between Paul and Chani, who is now fearful of her mate.

He leaned over, pulled her back into the bed, kissed her cheeks. “Soon we’ll go back to our desert,” he whispered. “Only a few things remain to be done here.”

She trembled at the finality in his voice.

He tightened his arms around her, murmured: “Don’t fear me, my Sihaya. Forget mystery and accept love. There’s no mystery about love. It comes from life. Can’t you feel that?”

“Yes.”

She put a palm against his chest, counting his heartbeats. His love cried out to the Fremen spirit in her—torrential, outpouring, savage. A magnetic power enveloped her.

“I promise you a thing, beloved,” he said. “A child of ours will rule such an empire that mine will fade in comparison. Such achievements of living and art and sublime—”

“We’re here now!” she protested, fighting a dry sob. “And … I feel we have so little … time.”

“We have eternity, beloved.”

“You may have eternity. I have only now.”
“But this is eternity.”

As Chani nears the end of her pregnancy, they travel to Sietch Tabr—Chani’s childhood home—with an odd company including many of the members of the conspiracy, even though Paul knows some are enemies. When Chani dies in childbirth, he lets go of his oracular vision, and becomes truly blind. At the same time, the ghola Hayt reacts to a trigger implanted in him by the Tleilaxu, which compels him to kill Paul; instead, his body reacts against his conditioning and he recovers the entire consciousness of Duncan Idaho, an feat which was believed impossible.

Paul learns that he is the father of twins, and that they are preborn like Alia. Scytale, the Face Dancer, reveals himself, and tortures Paul with a decision: now that he has seen that a ghola can regain its past memories, does he wish for the Tleilaxu to create a clone of Chani? Scytale holds the twins at knifepoint, and demands that Paul accept the deal of a lab-grown Chani in return for all of his CHOAM holdings.

The climax of the novel requires all of the context and setup of the first two novels, and the payoff is exquisite, if not epic. Paul, unable to see now from his empty sockets, senses his eyes opening, and realizes he is seeing through the eyes of his son. Seeing himself ignored by the others, he is able to remove his knife. Then, carefully judging the angle, he throws the knife into Scytale’s face, killing him, and momentarily ending the chaos.

We leave Arrakis as Paul wanders into the desert, physically and prophetically blind. His twins Ghanima and Leto II are secure as heirs to his throne, and the empire will be ruled by Alia until they are of age. Alia is furious over the loss of her brother, though she finds some solace in her romantic relationship with the Hayt-Duncan ghola. She orders that the remaining members of the conspiracy be executed—all except Irulan, who professes sincerely to have loved Paul without knowing it. She renounces her ties to the Bene Gesserit and commits to teaching Paul’s children.

The book is certainly different than its predecessor. It transforms Paul into a tragic hero, limiting his power and critiquing humanity’s penchant for elevating mere men. An unsettling disquiet permeates, and the tone and pacing are not quite aligned with those of Dune. As with the first book, while the plot is thrilling, the subtext is where the real value is. Dune Messiah is packed with nuggets relating to ideologism, theology, spirituality, mythology, etc. Herbert isn’t necessarily right about any of it, or even expressing his own views, but the book makes the reader think beyond the pages, which is a real treat. It is at times difficult to read, as in parsing for the meaty bits I would often get interested in themes that seem to be inserted only to add flavor. One item I found to be very thought-provoking was the idea that religion and government are incompatible—not just that laws should not be based upon religious ideas. There is an echo of Pharisaical tendencies to concern oneself too such an extent on law that the spiritual aspect of religion is replaced entirely. Jessica expounds on the idea in a letter she writes to Alia.

“You produce a deadly paradox,” Jessica had written. “Government cannot be religious and self-assertive at the same time. Religious experience needs a spontaneity which laws inevitably suppress. And you cannot govern without laws. Your laws eventually must replace morality, replace conscience, replace even the religion by which you think to govern. Sacred ritual must spring from praise and holy yearnings which hammer out a significant morality. Government, on the other hand, is a cultural organism particularly attractive to doubts, questions and contentions. I see the day coming when ceremony must take the place of faith and symbolism replaces morality.”

Though the book does suffer slightly from its transitional nature—it is a relatively slim volume tucked between the two epics, Dune and Children of Dune—it is nonetheless a worthy, though-provoking entry in the science-fiction and Dune canons.