'Quartet in Autumn' by Barbara Pym

        A week or so ago, I finished Barbara Pym's late novel 'Quartet in Autumn' - a book I have been meaning to read for some time now; a fragment of a wider and perhaps now lost  Anglo-Catholic culture.  (After  dipping into Mervyn Peake's behemoth 'Titus Groan' I am now currently reading the patrician 'The Soldier Philosophers' by Anthony Powell.)
As you may remember I have written about 'Quartet in Autumn' before when I was reviewing Paul Scott's panoramic and intricate 'Jewel in the Crown', set in the final years of the British Raj. 

     Both writers had been shortlisted for the 1977 Booker Prize - Scott for 'Staying On' set in Post-Independence India, and Pym for 'Quartet in Autumn'.  Both writers were deserving of public recognition, but the prize went to Scott who was by then not only an alcoholic but dying of cancer. He was to ill to be present at the award ceremony and died four months later in March 1978. Pym at the time was in remission from breast cancer, but it returned and she died in early 1980.  
      'Quartet in Autumn' was conceived in the wake of her diagnosis and treatment in 1971,  when she was working in the office of the International African Institute in London, and it was the first of novel of hers to be published since 'No Fond Return of Love' in 1961.  Early on in the book, in language that reflects the opinion of various publishers, there is a description of the sort of novel that one of the main characters is looking for: 'She had been an unashamed reader of novels, but if she hoped to find one which reflected her own sort of life she had come to realize that the position of an unmarried, unattached, ageing woman is of no interest whatever to the writer of modern fiction.' 

    All of that changed, however, in the mid '70s when, following an article in 'The Times Literary Supplement', there was a shift critical opinion, with 'Quartet in Autumn' being published in 1977, followed by 'The Sweet Dove Died' in 1978.  Four novels were published posthumously.

      'Quartet in Autumn' is the story of four co-workers who share a single office.  They are all roughly the same age and are all facing retirement. The office is in some un-named and un-described organization in central London, in the early '70s.  Faceless perhaps, I suppose.  I suspect, though, it is some form of institute of higher education, possibly in Bloomsbury. There are two men, Edwin and Norman, and two women, Letty and Marcia, one of whom, Marcia, has, like Barbara Pym herself, undergone a mastectomy. What any of these four does exactly is a mystery, or rather an irrelevance, as this novel is, apart from the impending fear of old age - loneliness, illness, and death, essentially about those bonds that develop between people who have been thrown together in the workplace - people no doubt that wouldn't have naturally formed friendships - and what happens to those relationships where circumstances change, and how much we owe to them.

     Pym is the chronicler of the mundane, of lives that have not been successful according to the world.  The depicter of the precarious life, the life lived in the bedsitter or the rented room, of the small pleasure.  A sense of the inadequate and the failure pervades her work,  of roads un-adopted where 'removed lives, loneliness clarifies'.

'No Country for Old Men' by Cormac McCarthy

      'That is no country for old men'.... so begins one of W B Yeats most famous poems, 'Sailing to Byzantium'.  The country in question here, in this potent novel, is southern Texas on the Mexico border; part of what is often referred to as 'flyover country' that great hinterland of the United States between the east and west coasts, 'that vast obscurity beyond the city where the dark fields of the Republic rolled on under the night', and a place that Cormac McCarthy has visited before in his novels.  It is also his own country for, although born on the East Coast, the majority of his childhood and adolescence was lived in Tennessee.  He is a writer who has only really entered my field of few in the last few years, and this is the first novel of his that I have read.

     'No country for Old Men' is a three way tussle between the Ed Tom Bell the sheriff, Llewelyn Moss the petty criminal, and the psychotic Anton Chirgurh, the hired killer.  The novel opens with the discovery of a sprawl of corpses and abandoned vehicles in the desert.  Moss has stumbled upon some sort altercation between drugs gangs, or some such.  And among the dead and the dying he makes a further discovery, one that drives the narrative.  That fight in the desert is never fully explained, for this is a lean, tense novel, sparse in the way that Jean Pierre Melville's cinematic masterpiece 'Le Cercle Rouge' is sparse. (sparse of punctuation too) Information is withheld from the reader.  In one sense it doesn't matter, the novel is not about Mexican drug cartels as such but a personal conflict between three men. A concentrated affair, that is part thriller, part Western and part meditation.  The result of this economy of information, however, is that the reader is left wandering through, what I can only describe as, a nocturnal battlefield.  A novel of darkness and fire.  And one I would recommend.

The Great Gatsby II

     I have unearthed a review of this wonderful book which I find I wrote, to my consternation nineteen years ago. I find also that what I wrote then and what I wrote this week aren't so very different.  I have largely kept the text as printed, dropping in the odd word or phrase [in square brackets] where they might help the clarity of the text.

     There are certain books, a 'Canon' of texts, that stand out from the others around them and transcend the era in which they are written.  This book is one of them.  'The Great Gatsby' is set in Twenties America.  This is the 'Jazz Age'.  And as expected this is a novel of excess, rather, it is a book that dwells of excess.  The style is in fact succinct and direct, marking a change from his previous two novels which still have a 'nineteenth century' feel to them.  The sentences are crisper, words are not wasted. The plot too is carefully, skillfully put together.  It is simple and clear, a concentrated work.  Jay Gatsby, a mysterious and hugely wealthy young man attempts to get close to a society woman, Daisy, once his lover and now married to plutocrat Tom Buchannan. thse story is narrated by Nick Caraway, a cousin of Daisy, who after the Great War has moved out east to make a fortune on the New York money markets.  renting a house on Long Island he finds himself the neighbour of Gatsby, and his neighbour finds [in Nick] the key that will unlock to him the world which daisy inhabits.  The novel describes, painfully, the results of this.
     Fitzgerald once remarked to Ernest Hemingway the "the rich aren't like you and me."  To which Hemmingway replied; "Yes, they're richer."  To Fitzgerald they were objects of fascination and unease, perhaps even disgust.  To some extent Scott wrote to become rich, and he himself became emblematic of the period [of American history] although his novels are critical of the amorality of twenties America.  This ambivalence is reflected in the book, so that for Marxist theorists Tom and Daisy become ciphers for a whole class, but in the end Hemmingway was right.  Tom is simply a villain and Daisy's motivation is mixed materialism and ordinary fear.  Indeed all the main characters, with the exception of the narrator, are corrupt and corrupting.  Our sympathies though, lie with Gatsby because we have a 'Romantic' view of love, just as he does. Like Gatsby we believe that that people should follow their desires, even though, in his case, they are irrational and obsessive and lead ultimately to his criminality.  In the final pages of the book Scott compares Gatsby's' desire for sel-fullfilment, which incidentally started off as old-fashioned self-improvement, with the American Dram - a passage for me of great emotional intensity - but Gatsby's struggle, perhaps like America's, is ultimately futile because it is based solely on desire.

The Great Gatsby I

It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire.

     Today - the 10th of April 2025 - marks the hundredth anniversary of the publication of one of the finest American novels of the 2oth century - perhaps even the finest - 'The Great Gatsby'.  It was F Scott Fitzgerald's 3rd published novel and it seems to me to be the distillation of the art.  The very essence.   The American critic Charles R Jackson called it 'the only flawless novel in the history of American literature.'

    Comparatively short, succinct but not parsimonious in style - to quote T S Eliot:

 where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together

       - there is something deeply satisfying about this novel.  It is one my favourite books.  It is a book I have returned to time and again.

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.

      I suppose the plot is simple enough - it is a small enough tragedy, though scandalous. Yet 'costing not less than everything' - to quote T S Eliot again.  It is the attempt of the narrator to put something right.  The story of Jay Gatsby and his loves, and how he is mastered by them.  The setting is the plutocratic world of Long Island, and New York, but also, fleetingly and movingly, 'the forgotten Swede towns' of the Mid-west. (Both Gatsby and the narrator it turns our are, like Fitzgerald himself, Mid-westerners.) It is the early 1920s and it is the 'Jazz Age'. Gatsby, I think, is rather like Miss Jean Brodie, in that both eminently charismatic but ultimately flawed characters who are unseated by their desire for the absolute.  Both are cultural Romantics of a very 19th century cast and are brought down by an adversary who is more ruthless than they.  And both are characters that enthrall the reader, offering the prospect of a live lived 'purified' of the dross, yet are really morally compromised, and, in the case of Jean Brodie a comic grotesque.  Gatsby is certainly not that. 

     

'Serotonin'

      Well, I've finally finished reading 'Serotonin' by the French novelist Michel Houellebecq - that's one I was reading concurrently with Joseph Conrad's 'Lord Jim'.  Not a thing I would recommend, reading two novels simultaneously, for like having two masters 'either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other'.  Indeed, 'Serotonin' seemed a bit vapid compared to Conrad. It just doesn't have the heft.  Vapid too, compared to Houellebecq's earlier work.  As I wrote in an earlier post on these two book 'Serotonin' doesn't really stand up to say 'Atomised' of 'Platform'.  An opinion that, as you can see, hasn't changed.  At only one point did the novel hold my attention and that was when its focus shifted from navel-gazing to a putative insurrection by a group of well armed farmers.  It was both engaging and, finally, rather moving.  Alas, in a manner that echoed the half-hearted 'evenements' in 'Submission', neither the insurrection or Houellebecq's interest lasted that long, and the novel limped off to its conclusion.

Curently reading....

      I am actually reading two novels at once, quite an unusual thing for me to do.  In the past I have occasionally suspended reading one novel to read another, say at Christmas when I might lay the current novel aside to read something more seasonal.  In the past this has included the Christmas books by Dickens, or Dylan Thomas's 'A Child's Christmas in Wales', or as last year the Collected Ghost Stories of M R James.
    The novels in this simultaneous read are 'Lord Jim' by Joseph Conrad and 'Serotonin' by Michel Houellebecq.  And what a difference a hundred years or so makes - from richness and complexity to something much more spare and lean, a observation both general and particular.  But then Houellebecq is a much more polemical, if not downright feral novelist.  Conrad, in comparison, a gentleman.  Really, I can't think of such an ill-assorted pair.  Amid so many glaring differences, yesterday evening (after I had published this little post) I realised that one of the subtle differences between these two novelists is that Houellebecq is writing in an age of consumerism and Conrad not.  It is enough for a contemporary novelist in attempting to define a character merely throw in a few brands for the reader to have some idea as to the taste, social position and wealth of the person described. (I think it may have Ian Fleming who started this trend.)

     I only started reading Conrad late last year with 'The Secret Agent' and was quite bowled over. I was reminded of Dickens, Dostoevsky and Conrad's contemporary Ford Madox Brown.  He is a great and subtle stylist. 

     I have to confess to being a little disappointed (so far) with 'Serotonin' though.  It lacks the venom, the sheer spite, of say 'Atomised' or 'Platform', or even the elegiac quality of 'The Map and the Territory' and 'Submission'.  Perhaps things will improve.

Last year in reading....

    Happy New Year!   The return of something I last did way back in 2016. I cannot believe it was quite so long ago.  Anyway here is (as far as I can remember) my fiction reading from this last year.  Discoveries were: 'Dr Zhivago', 'The Jewel in the Crown', and 'The Secret Agent'.  'Heretics of Dune', by Frank Herbert was, like 'God Emperor of Dune', was a much more impressive piece of fiction than 'Dune'. Only one real disappointment: 'Heat Wave' by Penelope Lively.

'Dr Zhivago'

    

   ‘Dr Zhivago' is a book I have been intending to read for years - inspired by David Lean's cinematic adaptation - but never got round to until this year.  It was the cover, I have to confess, of this Fontana Books edition of 1969 that I found in a second-hand bookshop that finally galvanised me into action.

     I really don't want to dwell here on Lean’s film of 1965.  It, after all, deserves a blogpost all to itself, but I will say that at times the film differs markedly from the book.  That is inevitable in any film adaptation and perhaps it's best to think of the film as a riff on Pasternak's novel.  I don't think those changes matter too much, however I have to register a disappointment that the book does not contain the line 'The personal life is dead in Russia.  History has killed it.'  It appears the screenwriter Robert Bolt has to be thanked for that.

      Like Shostakovich's 13th Symphony, 'Dr Zhivago' is a product of the so-called 'Khrushchev Thaw' - a time in the Soviet Union, post WWII, post Stalin, when there was a loosening of the state’s control of the arts (amongst other things).  Both the symphony and the novel challenged the limits of that 'thaw'.  The premiere of the symphony, December 18th 1962, took place against a background of intimidation by the authorities. Six years earlier when Boris Pasternak (1890-1970) had submitted the manuscript of Dr Zhivago to the literary journal 'Novy Mir' for publication it was rejected. It was just too critical of the Soviet regime. For a while it was circulated between Pasternak’s friends and then in 1957 it was smuggled out to the West, where its publication caused a sensation, and some literary critics were driven to hyperbole.  These two examples are taken from the back cover of the Fontana edition:

     ‘Doctor Zhivago will, I believe, come to stand as one of the great events in man’s literary and moral history.’   Edmund Wilson in The New Yorker

     ‘The first work of genius to come out of the Russia since the Revolution.’  V S Prichett in The New Statesman.

     With exception of the Epilogue, ‘Dr Zhivago’ is set during the first quarter of the 20^th century in Russia, opening when Yuri Zhivago is a child of 10 and concluding with his death at the age 0f approximately 35.  The majority of the novel is, however, concerned with the nine years of conflict between 1914, where Russia entered WWI, and the end of the Russian Civil War in 1922/23.  With Revolution of 1917 the external enemy is replaced with the internal, as Russia went to war with herself.  The Civil War that followed, alone, claimed between 5-7 million lives, mainly civilians.
     Against this almost apocalyptic historical process Zhivago attempts to find space to form a stable family life, first with Tonya and then Lara.  To insulate themselves from the titanic events grinding away like tectonic plates beneath them.  (The third attempt, which happens later in Moscow, is given a much briefer account.)  Their happiness is fleeting, and Yuri is defeated in each attempt. He loses everything each time and in that process of erosion is reduced to a husk of a man.  A man destroyed. The personal life was, indeed, dead in Russia.  Towards the end of the novel are two extraordinary passages when this broken man, still grasping at life, makes two epic journeys on foot through a decimated land, almost bereft of another living being.  Quite haunting, if not disturbing - one can almost feel as sense of evil abroad.  This is a strongly evocative book that seems to gather in strangeness as it progresses, and the everyday is shredded by conflict and the new authorities.  Though in the Realist tradition of the 19^th century, there is a deep sense of the 'other' particularly when we leave the city and venture out deep into the Russian countryside.
     I can’t help feel that the influence of Dostoevsky is close at hand – though as my knowledge of Russian literature is somewhat limited I may be wrong, but it seems to be there in the way the characters talk and interact and those philosophic discursions that pepper the book.  Tolstoy too in the vast scale and ambition.  Pasternak is attempting to convey the entirety of Russia – hence, I suppose the vast geographical and historical scope of the novel, one that suggests some sort of metaphysical intent.  Hence also the great number of named minor characters, which can be confusing.
     Much is made in the film adaptation of Yuri’s adulterous relationship with Larissa (Lara) Antipova, and the critic Stuart Hampshire reviewing the book in ‘Encounter’ called it ‘One of the most profound descriptions of Love in the whole range of modern literature.’ Yes, what unfolds is a love story.  And perhaps it is a strand of this novel that is most easy to pick up on in a novel that one critic rightly called 'elusive'. Dr Zhivago is, however, much more than that.  It is the story of a nation, a people, descending into madness and barbarism. Whole communities were wiped off the face of the earth. There were biblical scale plagues of vermin, and famine, and there were the 'Besprizorniki' (translated on wiki as 'The Unattended') - millions of abandoned children whose lives were lived on the streets, surviving by begging, stealing and prostitution.  It could be that some of those who were forced by circumstance into the latter were under the age of ten.¹  It is beyond comprehension.

1 They were the children of those killed in WWI, the Civil War, the famines and the purges.

'The Jewel in the Crown'

 

    '....the spectacle of two nations in violent opposition, not for the first time nor as yet for the last because they were then still locked in an imperial embrace of such long standing and subtlety it was no longer possible for them to know whether they hated or loved one another, or what it was that held them together and seemed to have confused the image of their separate destinies....' 

 

       In 1977 Barbara Pym, after years of critical neglect, was shortlisted for the Booker prize for her late novel 'Quartet in Autumn'.  The prize however was in the end awarded to Paul Scott for 'Staying on', a novel set in post-independence India.  Being a Pym fan I've often regretted that she lost that November evening in 1977, as she never seemed quite to have received the acclaim due to her in her own lifetime.¹ 
     However reading 'Jewel in the Crown' - the first novel of the 'Raj Quartet' - I have modified my opinion.  Scott was obviously a profoundly talented writer, well deserving of such public recognition, which seems particularly poignant when one considers that he was too ill to attend the award ceremony - cancer and alcoholism.  He died the following March.

 

      'This is the story of a rape, of the events that led up to it and followed it, and of the place in which it happened.'

 

     'The Jewel in the Crown' is set in those turbulent years at the end of the British Raj. In particular it focuses on the events in the fictional north Indian city of Mayapore in the midst of World War II when in the wake of the Viceroy's declaration of war against the Axis Powers and the successful Japanese assault on Burma the Indian National Congress mounted the 'Quit India Campaign'.  In the resultant violence two English women resident in Mayapore are assaulted, one sexually.  And it is this period in the history of India that Scott experienced first-hand as an officer in the British Army in the subcontinent and Burma.

     'The Jewel in the Crown', which has no single linear narrative as such, pieces together from various witnesses the story of these two women.  There are letters, diary entries and records of conversations; the result is more like a dossier.  However, the compiler of this dossier, whether journalist or academic, remains unknown, though we can surmise that this research is undertaken some years after independence.  The result is utterly compelling, a dazzling piece of literature.

 

     Mayapore consists of two areas; the original city and the cantonment which housed the British military and civilians.  I think I should add here that these cantonments were constructed all over sub-continent in the wake of the Indian Mutiny/Rebellion of 1857.  In the case of Mayapore this segregation of communities is further enforced by the presence of a river and a railway line between them.  The characters and therefore the plot, however, inhabit a third, intermediate, space between those two sometimes harsh realities.  I do not mean these characters are necessarily outsiders; Lady Chatterjee for instance is certainly no outsider, being very well connected socially in both communities; but others such as the perceptive Sister Ludmilla, who is rather like an Orthodox yurodivy (a fool-in-Christ), most certainly are.  She is rather like a piece of driftwood that the tides of life and fate have left stranded in the city.  

     It is through her eyes that we first encounter Hari Kumar, oddly Nehru-like² and adrift between cultures, and Ronald Merrick, the local police superintendent, on what is their first meeting; and through her observations of that inauspicious event, we learn that Merrick is homosexual:

     'It was so with the policeman.  The policeman saw him too.  I always suspected the policeman.  Blond, also good looking, he also had sinews [like Kumar], his arms were red and covered with fine blond hairs; and his eyes were blue, the pale blue of a child's doll; he looked right but didn't smell right.  To me, who had been about in the world, he smelt all wrong.  "And who is that?" he said.  "Also one of your helpers?  The boy there?  The boy washing at the pump?"

      I would argue that from this passage (with its sly, 'under-the-radar' homo-eroticism) in which sister Ludmilla stresses the similarities between the two men, and from what is said later in the novel, that Kumar too is homosexual.  As I was working on this post, and in particular on this scene, I began to wonder about Scott's own sexuality; it turns out that although he was married (unsuccessfully) he was himself homosexual.  I cannot help but feel that somehow that knowledge, for me at least, changes the dynamic of the relationship between Kumar and Merrick, and between the characters and the author. Perhaps not in a comfortable way.  

     Both men, however, regardless, or because of their sexuality, attempt to pursue a relationship with clumsy, awkward Daphne Manners, and it is this fierce little tragedy played out against the vast flow of history that forms the core this novel.

     There is something of the French and Russian nineteenth century novel about 'The Jewel in the Crown' in its scope.  A vast, sprawling sort of book echoing a vast and complex setting. In a sense it is an attempt (perhaps in the manner of Dostoevsky) to understand, or even define India, which is as much a creation of the British administration and British and European political thought as much as anything else.  It is a hybrid polity.  This attempt to reach such a definition (if such a thing is possible) is something that also occupied the mind of another British writer of the 20th century, E M Forster in 'A Passage to India' - it must be either audacity or hubris that made Forster think he reduce India to 'God si Love', but then he was one for the apophthegm. One gets a sense, particularly towards the end of the novel, not only that 'India' is something that the British could not, or would not, understand but that the leaders of the independence movement were little different.  But then the struggle for Independence was at some level a conflict of elites. India was, like Post-War Britain to be a seed-bed for elite-driven utopian planning. For Nehru, schooled in late nineteenth century British socialism of the Fabian variety, India was to be transformed into the image of the nation whose rule he rejected.  Indeed the whole process of independence was fraught with paradox. That isn't meant as a criticism.  We all exist in some sort of paradox; it's all part of the human condition.

 

 

1 There is a marvellous, gently melancholic drama of that day, 'Miss Pym's Day Out', written by James Runcie for the BBC series 'Bookmark', and starring Patricia Routledge.  It's quite easy to find on YouTube.

 2 Hari Kumar was educated in England at the fictional public school Chillingborough, before the death of his father caused him to return to India. Jawaharlal Nehru was educated at Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge.  He jokingly referred to himself as 'the last Englishman to rule India'.

 

Dune III The Wyrd of the Atreides and the Planet Arrakis

 

'God created Arrakis to train the faithful.'

'We live on sufferance down here....Arrakis is our enemy.'

III The Wyrd of the Atreides & the Planet Arrakis

Camelot

     Nobility of purpose, then, is something largely lacking in the Dune Imperium, but it is to be found within the House of Atreides (from the Greek: 'The Sons of Atreus'), being embodied in the person of Duke Leto. There is mention of the 'Code of the Atreides', but - alas -  we only see the Ducal Household at a moment of dissolution.  These early chapters are all too peremptory, and I would have liked to have a bit more of that household and its whole cultural and political context. Perhaps that is a criticism that can be levelled at 'Dune' in general: Herbert is in a hurry to tell his story. We do however meet four members of the Ducal court and that is enough, one supposes, to establish something of the dynamic of court life of the Atreides and its (necessarily) military culture.  Of the four it is only necessary in this extended essay/post to make note of the charismatic paladin Duncan Idaho - 'Duncan the Moral', the swordmaster of the Ginaz. And I think that this is where the Arthurian element rests - and from there it is a quick and easy thing to do to make parallels between Leto and Arthur, Jessica and Guinevere, Duncan and Lancelot and the Mentat Thurfit Hawat and Merlin. Like Arthur, Leto is fated to be betrayed.

     As with The Lord of the Rings, the opening chapters of Dune are somehow out of rhythm, a little awkward. They don't quite convince. They are not quite 'other' enough. In addition I found the staccato rhythms of Herbert's prose style difficult to adjust to at times. The imaginative creation falters just a little at times and the court life of the Atreides is perhaps too much like Middle Class Suburban America of the early 1960s translated into space - I'm particularly thinking here of the dinner party scene on Arrakis. But then maybe that dinner party is an attempt to maintain standards in the face of overwhelming odds, rather like characters in a Conrad novel miles up-river dressing for dinner every night. There is, perhaps, also an attempt to draw a strong contrast between Paul's early comfortable life and his messianic destiny, which takes place not on the planet of his birth, Caladan, but on the implacably hostile desert planet Arrakis, colloquially known as 'Dune', the governance of which the Emperor, in collusion with House Harkonnen, has 'bestowed' upon the House of Atreides. It is, of course, a plot against the Atreides Duke, an offer that cannot be refused, but like an Heroic Age warrior chief and his war-band, such as you might find described in the epic poems 'Y Gododdin', or 'Beowulf', the Duke, his family & household, and his army go forth 'with solemn face to meet the darkness on the deep'.

There be dragons

     Crucial to the plot and Paul's political, cultural and religious revolution are the interaction between the politics of the Imperium and the ecology of Dune.  Arrakis is a frontier world, by which I don't mean that it stands at the very edge of the Imperium, but that humanity has a very limited and precarious position there; large areas of the planet are apparently uninhabited, barren and waterless.  It is a place of mystery, a place of secrets and immense dangers -  is often referred to as 'Hell' - where the majority of the population is huddled together in the mountainous terrain surrounding the N pole, while the southern hemisphere is a true Terra Incognita; which, for climatic and economic reasons is barely ever visited, let alone surveyed. An abandoned place. A Terra Nullius. Though things on Arrakis, and indeed everything in this book, are never quite what they seem.
      Arrakis however has one major (its only?) export: Spice aka Melange. A drug. It occurs naturally in the limitless dune seas of the northern hemisphere of the planet - 'an ocean in which no oar has dipped' - requiring little processing, though the harvesting is fraught with dangers - not only the implacably hostile environment, but the desert is home to the giant sandworm, which - rather like the monster in a B movie 'Creature Feature' - consumes everything in its path. The southern hemisphere appears is not so blessed, for spice mining does not occur there.
     Both the Spice, and its derivatives, are apparently consumed in vast quantities across the Known Universe, and it could be said to be the engine of the Imperial economy. All that said it appears not to have been consumed in the Ducal Court of Caladan.  Apart from turning the eyes of heavy users dark blue, Spice has geriatric properties, and there are other uses too, some ethnogenic, some purely utilitarian, that only become apparent as the novel progresses. The licence to harvest the spice is highly lucrative thing to possess, and House Atreides as a result would wax in wealth and power. But this, alas, is not to be.   

     Excluding the small groups of smugglers based on the planet, there are two settler communities on Arrakis 'village and seitch'; the smaller group 'the people of the garben, the sink and the pan' live in the far north of planet and are essentially there to service the spice mining industry. The larger group are a tribal society called the Fremen, the Freemen - that is they are outside the overarching Imperial class system. The relationship between both groups is complex, sometimes strained, sometimes intimate. There is some evidence that the Fremen have influenced the religious life of the northern communities. And there is inter-marriage, and some Fremen leave the desert and join the 'graben' like the 'Shadout Mapes', the housekeeper of the Ducal residence in Arrakeen who acts as a sort of contact between the Fremen of the desert - well, some of them at least - and the Atreides. And Dune, like the Lord of the Rings, only takes off when the main protagonists, Paul and Jessica fleeing into the dessert to escape their enemies, are fully immersed in a different, intense and spiritualised culture, that of the Fremen.

     It is never stated when the Fremen arrived on Arrakis, though with the establishment of the Imperial Botanical Testing Stations 'before the discovery of the Spice' there has been a human presence on the planet for at least ten thousand years, perhaps even from some time before the Butlerian Jihad. There is mention of a 'Botanical Testing Station period' in the history of the planet. The Dune Encyclopaedia (of disputed canonical status) gives the date of the Fremen arrival some seven millennia after the foundation of the Spacing Guild. When, by then, one presumes the 'people of the graben and sink' were firmly established. These secretive people see themselves as the descendants of an 'ancient' and persecuted religious sect.¹ 

 They are a people who unwilling to escape their bitter 'history' (I see that history as essentially mythological.) and are caught in a cycle of victimhood and revenge. "Never forget, never forgive." A people eternally sojourning in the wilderness, consuming - well, not manna, but that other divinely attributed nutriment, the Spice. Exiles among a universe of exiles. Waiting. 
     All that said the Fremen have a remarkable and complex material and spiritual culture (more of that in a later post). They have successfully colonised a uniquely hostile environment, but in doing so have had to adapt their social structures to survive. The result of this evolutionary change is a society that we would find harsh, perhaps even barbaric. It is structured to resemble, say, ancient Sparta or Republican Rome, where the individual is subsumed (and the ego, perhaps, destroyed) into the collective endeavour of a society organised along military lines, a society demanding, and receiving in turn, a high level of social conformity.²

  To give an example: a Fremen who has become blind is expelled from the community and thrust out into the desert to die; and from that it might be possible to surmise that the Fremen also practice exposure of infants.  A society that is distrustful of outsiders; 'offworld strangers' found in the deep desert are killed for their water. 'An entire culture trained to military order', as the Lady Jessica noted. The trade-off the for all this being survival of the individual in an environment that is objectively, quantifiably hostile, a place of complete existential threat.

     On the internet there is quite a debate about how Islamic/Arabic the Fremen are. In the case of the status of women it is definitely not. The Fremen faith is decidedly syncretistic, and what ever the faith was which they brought with them to Arrakis it has undergone substantial alteration at the hands of the harsh conditions of the planet and through contact with the Bene Gesserit. Neither do the Fremen speak Arabic, but a variant of Galach³, and the 'Hunting Language' Chakobsa. The exception to this being liturgical, and then, it could be argued, without any real understanding of the language (more of that later). Perhaps the use of Arabic among the Fremen is best thought as equivalent to the use of Latin in Western Europe during the Middle Ages. At this point it is enough to note also that some of the Arabic terms used among the Fremen, such as 'Lisan al-gaib' have a particular relationship with Sufism and the Greater Iranian cultural area. 

     Neither are the Fremen, as is widely said on-line & in the msm, nomadic. Fremen live in settled, troglodytic communities called sietch - some of which, such as Sietch Tabr, are really small towns with thousands of inhabitants. The Tau of the tribe or the sietch is help maintained via the Tau Orgy, which cements the unity of the tribe/sietch and allows for the dissipation of potential disruptive energy.  Fremen pattern of settlement and land holding is structured around a reliable water supply, for Dune is not entirely desert: there are small polar ice caps and when the geology allows there are springs and oases. In geological basins that are (important point this) disconnected from the open desert plants grow. Plants, that is, that have been introduced from elsewhere, off-planet. Terranic plants (i.e. from the Earth) do particularly well. As becomes clear in the novel there is water on the planet but is mainly trapped in the underlying strata. Though it is never overtly stated the Fremen must practice some form of cultivation. Otherwise how could the isolated sietch communities possibly survive? Perhaps surprisingly these communities possess a skilled manufacturing base, producing those items, such as stillsuits and stilltents, that are essential to desert living. And they are not so alienated that they don't trade with the other inhabitants of Dune, or with the wider Imperium, but how, one is entitled to ask, do the Fremen source raw materials or machinery, and yet maintain their secrecy? The smugglers, I guess. I mention this because it strikes me as an example of a number of ambiguities if not contradictions in the plot, that I can't quite explain to my satisfaction.

  

A short discursion: Arrakis and the Golden Flower 

     In the decades prior to Paul's arrival on Arrakis, the Fremen embarked on a remarkable undertaking: the greening of large areas of the planet, a multi-generational task. This however was not the first time this was attempted. As I showed above some time before the 'discovery of the Spice' Terranic desert species were introduced into the ecology of Arrakis. This attempt was subsequently abandoned pushing the terraforming of the planet into the realm of 'indefinitely postponed parousia'. All this changed with appointment of Pardot Kynes as Imperial Ecologist, in doing so probably making some form of future conflict inevitable on Arrakis.

     The arrival of the Atreides merely realigned Fremen priorities, for Paul's adventus on the planet immediately opened the way to violent Jihad - that is a parousia achieved by conflict. Not that this utopian greening of the Arrakis was abandoned - it was too late for that, for the process had already been imprinted on the ritual and spiritual life of the Fremen. This is how it was explained years later by Farok, himself a former Jihadi, in 'Dune Messiah';

      'The Atreides came [....] the one we named Usul in our seitch, his private name among us. Our Maud'dib, our Mahdi! And when he called for the Jihad, I was one of those who asked: 'Why should I go to fight there? I have no relatives there.' But the other men went - young men, friends, companions of my childhood. When they returned, they spoke of wizardry, of the power of this Atreides saviour. He fought our enemy the Harkonnens. Liet-Kynes who promised us paradise upon our planet, blessed him. It was said this Atreides came to change our world and the our universe, that he was the man to make the golden flower blossom in the night.'

     An interesting term that. Golden Flower. It is a Taoist term occurring in 'The Secret of the Golden Flower' the classic Neidan text. Neidan, I should explain here, is a Chinese form of meditation and inner alchemy that derives ultimately from Indian Tantric thought. For Jung the Golden Flower represented the state of being a fully integrated person. The promise of the Atreides is that by following him into Jihad the Fremen can, as individuals first, transcend their ancestral trauma, expanding their scope of cognition and reality. Herbert by using this vegetative analogy implies that Leit-Kynes offers the same thing but over a much longer time scale; one in pace with the societal changes in Fremen culture that the greening would entail. A process in which the Fremen would cease to be.

1 In the Appendices and Glossary they are referred to as the 'Zensunni Wanderers'. However in the narrative the term is never used either by the Fremen or others.  Some critics have suggested the Fremen use 'Misr' when referring to themselves. The evidence for that is ambiguous. The 'Terminology' at the back of the book says that the Fremen call themselves the 'Misr' meaning 'the people'.  However in the text it is used once - by the Reverend Mother Ramallo, who declares; 'We are the people of Misr.' i.e. a place. The term is the Arabic for 'Egypt' (deriving from the Semitic for 'border') and refers to their supposed origins.

2 As Paul himself noted (quoting from the Orange Catholic Bible):  'Law and duty are one; so be it.  But remember these limitations - Thus you are never fully conscious.  Thus do you remain immersed in the communal Tau.  Thus are you always less than an individual.'

3 One variant word is given in the novel; 'cielago' for 'bat'. It is derived from Spanish. Interestingly, as the Lady Jessica notes, '....this was the language of Ilm and Fiqh....' It opens up the possibility that the Ilm and Fiqh, which are either written or oral and form part of Fremen religious culture are written in an unnamed language.

Dune II The Context: Empire and Jihad

    'A beginning is a time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct. [] To begin your study of the life of Muad'dib, then, take care that you first place him in his time; born in the 57th year of the reign of the Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV.'

II The Context: Empire and Jihad

   Dune is a book that has to come to us from the future, possibly from a time hundreds, if not thousands, of years later than the events it describes. It is a history of sorts, an attempt, as it were, to fill in the gaps left in the religious texts and official histories, fragments of which introduce each chapter. An intimate history and perhaps a corrective, with very few grand scenes; most events occur in small private spaces such as a bedroom or a cave, or even inside a tent. In addition any number of these scenes occur at night or in the dark. Each scene usually contains a limited number of characters, to whose thought processes the reader has access.  The sort of scenes where the only witnesses are the protagonists themselves. (We witness no battles in space, or indeed experience space travel.) It all adds up to a world of secrecy, but more of that later. This constricted viewpoint makes for a paradox in a novel that is so concerned with such vast existential and metaphysical concerns and some critics have likened to an opera. It carries echoes of 'The Secret History' of Procopius.

    It might be interesting, then, to investigate which events are given a full literary treatment, which are given a passing mention and which are omitted, and why that is.  At times, reading this novel is like a journey through a darkened landscape with only flashes of illumination. We see through a glass darkly. 

     Although a 'campus novel' of the late 1960s - like, indeed, the Lord of the Rings - the work of Herbert does not, it seems from my limited vantage point, have that same sort of fan-base as Tolkein. It does not inspire that same devotion. And is there any wonder? Dune is not an easy book. As I have outlined above it is violent and harsh, depicting a society where all too often human life is cheap. And although the narrative can be said to follow an archetypal arc in the manner of Jung and Campbell there are, with one notable exception, no heroes.

The Empire

     To set the scene. It is some 20,000 years into the future. Mankind, (there are no alien species), has spread across the universe and is given a resemblance of unity in a vast Universal Empire - the 'Padishah Empire', a finely balanced construction of sometimes opposing forces. Although seemingly stable - after all it has lasted some 10,000 years - the Empire is a place of distrust, of simmering resentments, feuds. Motivation is often clouded, confused and cynical. Secrecy often prevails with plot weaving with plot. It feels as though even close personal relationships are marred by this general dis-ease.

    There are any number of technological devices in advance of our own: 'glowglobes', 'suspensors', 'cones of silence', 'stoneburners'. Some, in the later books, are quite extraordinary. However progress, beyond that narrow technological sense, is lacking: democracy is apparently universally absent; feudalism rules; there is a rigid social hierarchy (there may even be sumptuary laws) and there is slavery; and those planets that somehow have retained their highly advanced technical and computational base during the Butlerian Jihad, such as Ix and Richesse, are highly stratified technocratic societies resembling the 'World State' depicted in Huxley's 'Brave New World'. In many ways humanity as returned to a pre-modern state: there is, for instance, no mass media.

     What is more, the Known Universe is a domain of exiles, a people without a home; for the Earth, previously itself the subject of a cataclysmic event (it was hit by an asteroid), has been lost in the depths of time. It has become a mythological place. Humanity has been permanently cast out of Eden. Everyone is a colonist.

The Jihad

     Mid point between then and now, in the years preceding the foundation of the Empire, there occurred a seismic cultural and technological event the effects of which are still being felt at the time of the novel: The Butlerian Jihad. That is the destruction of all thinking machines across the entire Known Universe; 'Thou shall not make a machine in the image of man,' pronounces the Orange Catholic Bible. Subsequently all political, scientific and cultural spheres have had to adjust to the new reality, forging new technologies and organisations such as the Spacing Guild and the Bene Gesserit in order to cope. Humans are trained, and perhaps genetically manipulated, to replace computers. They are also subject to a covert breeding programme by one of these new organisations, or 'schools', the quasi-messianic Bene Gesserit. This shadowy, secretive sisterhood, which manages to infiltrate every corner of Imperial society, has spent millennia carefully pursuing the goal of the 'Kwisazt Haderach' (from the Hebrew 'Kefitzat Haderach'), a man who is capable of working with higher order dimensions, who has access to all the memories of both his male and female ancestors and most importantly has prescience - that is almost divine attributes. Think the next evolutionary stage for the humanity, but one which would give inordinate power to the Bene Gesserit enabling them through the semi-divine person of the Kwisatz to control all the pillars of the post-Jihad Imperial settlement.* This breeding plan has almost come to fruition. Only for, at this late stage, for all of it to go sideways, for the Bene Gesserit Jessica Atreides under instruction to bear the Duke, Leto I, a daughter gave birth, some fifteen years previous to opening of the novel a son, Paul. (Paul: from the Latin for 'small, 'humble'. Paul after all is described as short for his years.) Dune is the story of Paul's rise to ultimate secular and spiritual power in the Known Universe, Herbert drawing on the lives of both the Islamic prophet Muhammad and the British WWI Army officer Lawrence of Arabia amongst others. Echoes, for instance, of Alexander the Great (both the historical Macedonian king and the Alexander of the 'Alexander Romance', particularly as described in the 'Shahnameh' of Ferdowsi) and the Patriarch Moses. I've noticed several internet commentators picking up on the influence of a now little-known book 'The Sabres of Paradise', by the British author and traveller Lesley Branch (1904-2007). It is a fictionalized account of Imam Shamil, third Imam of the 'Caucasian Imamate' and his doomed attempt to resist Russian expansion into the Caucasus. Important thing, the title 'Imam' in this context and one I want to return to its implications in a later post. Anyway, Branch's book is the source of all sorts stuff in Dune. One final source, in an already heady mix, before I finish this post: in one interview Herbert said he had been influenced by the Arthurian legends - not an influence I readily picked up upon on first reading.  

     I would add, 14.02.2025, 'Lord Jim' by the incomparable Joseph Conrad; the relationship of the natives and Lord Jim in Patusan and Lord Jim bears comparison to the relationship between the Fremen and Paul. One of them even carries a Kris knife.

* 10.8.23 This morning I watched a video on Youtube made by Esoterica on the little known British artist and occultist Austin Osman Spare and his theory of magic. I really can't go into it here but there seemed a real parallel between what Spare was trying to do and the Bene Gesserit, particularly in regards to the accessing of ancestral memories. I think it's likely to be just coincidental, unless Spare's writings were available to Herbert through various New Age groups on the West Coast. 

'Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds' - Dune Messiah

     I don't usually issue a 'spoiler alert', as I make an effort when writing a review not to disclose too much plot information, but just enough to intrigue. However this book cannot really be discussed without revealing more than usual. You have been warned.

     Apologies for this post having taken so long: firstly lockdown has really taken it out of me and although I am functioning and not just slumped in a heap in a corner with depression motivation is something I have lost. Secondly this post, like the 'Dune' post, has been subject to endless editing as I have been trying to get to grips with what is an extraordinary piece of literary imagination. 

     'We saw our parents' nakedness; Rivers of blood will be required to cover them. Rivers of blood.'

     I've been re-reading 'Dune Messiah' by Frank Herbert, the second novel in his 'Dune' sequence - a slim intermezzo of a book between the behemoths of 'Dune' and 'Children of Dune'. Not that I would want to suggest that 'Dune Messiah' is in anyway 'light' or frivolous. It is certainly neither. This re-reading, I have to admit, has been prompted partly by the growing excitement on social media over Denis Villeneuve's new film adaptation of 'Dune' but also by a loss of direction in my reading. It was there at my bedside and I just picked it up for want of something better. I suspect 'Dune Messiah' gets called a sequel for convenience sake - I certainly did in my post about 'Dune'. However we would be wrong to do so: Herbert originally conceived the first three novels (of what would eventually be six novel cycle) as one. It was his agent who got Herbert spilt them into three worried that they would make too hefty a tome for easy reading. (Herbert speaking at UCLA 17.04.85) Certainly there are parts of 'Dune Messiah' that were written at the same time 'Dune'.

     And I must say I'm glad I did, for although at times, as I mentioned in my previous 'Dune' post, the 'Duniverse' is a very strange place at times - the climax of 'Dune Messiah' is one of the weirdest and saddest things I have yet read - this has been an intense, immersive experience. In fact it has had quite a profound effect on me, causing me not only to re-asses my attitude to the Sci-fi but causing me to loose sleep as its strange and hermetic themes swirled about my head. So much so that I changed by bedtime reading to the much duller world of Margaret Drabble and 'The Ice Age', a state-of-the-nation novel of the mid 70s. What I was really looking for was 'Great Fortune', the first of Olivia Manning's fabulous Balkan Trilogy. (I have already the third novel in the sequence: 'Friends and Heroes'.) Anyway 'The Ice Age' has turned out to be oddly successful for a novel that is virtual all 'tell' and no 'show', and I would recommend it.

     'He remembered his earliest visions of the jihad-to-be, the terror and revulsion he'd experienced. Now of course he knew visions of greater terror. He had lived with the real violence. He had seen his Fremen charged with mystical strength sweep all before him in the religious war. The jihad gained a new perspective. It was finite, of course, a brief spasm when measured against eternity, but beyond that lay horrors to overshadow anything in the past.'

     'Dune Messiah' is, I suspect, not so much read as 'Dune' and this has allowed the latter to be misinterpreted. David Lynch's film of 1984 certainly did (Why on earth did it rain at the end of the film killing off all the sandworms destroying thereby all spice production and consequently ending space travel?) and I fear that the latest cinematic adaptation directed by Denis Villeneuve may well be found guilty of the same. I really cannot emphasise enough that Paul Muad'dib is not a hero. He is not as Timothee Chalamet said in a 'Vanity Fair' interview 'Think Greta Thunberg, only she's a Jedi with a diploma from Hogwarts'. (Unless, of course, he knows something about la Thunbeg that we don't.) It doesn't bode well. And he is certainly not the 'Mightey-Whitey' of Noah Berlatsky's article in escapist.com.* I think it might have helped his case if Mr Berlatsky had actually done some reading in preparation. Otherwise how do you explain such a wilful misreading of the texts? Paul is not the leader of some armed liberation movement, but a mass murderer guilty of genocide on an incomprehensible scale, or else, to exonerate him a little, merely the facilitator of such a gargantuan crime:

     '[]....at a conservative estimate, I've killed sixty-one billion people, sterilised ninety planets, completely demoralised four hundred others. I've wiped out the followers of forty religions [] We'll be a hundred generations recovering from Muad'dib's Jihad.'

     The Fremen jihad was a war for the political and religious domination of the Known Universe - not a war to set themselves free from oppression, but a revenge on the rest of humanity for thousands of years of perceived subjugation. Just a niggle but it is never explained how the Jihad commences, or how the Fremen achieve such cataclysmic results. Yes, we are told that they are fanatics, but still.... Historically, the success of the Islamic/Arab conquests were in part due to the exhaustion of the two great powers of the day, the Eastern Roman Empire and Sassanid Iran, after an apocalyptic war. There is no evidence of any such civilizational fatigue in the Dune Universe, unless one counts the lack of religious belief among the elites of the Empire. My guess is that after the defeat of Shaddam IV and his Sardukar troops on Arrakis the Empire momentarily collapsed into anarchy and the Jihad grew out of Muad'dib's re-assertion of Imperial authority, but it is only speculation.

     'No more terrible disaster could befall your people than for them to fall into the hands of a hero.'

     'Dune Messiah' opens twelve years after the events of 'Dune'; Muad'dib's Jihad - that 'blood-dimmed tide' - has, as we have seen, spread to nearly all the inhabited worlds; the small Arrakid city of Arakeen is now the Imperial capital and the centre of all religious life in the Empire - thousands make the Hajj, the pilgrimage, to its temples and shrines; Muad'dib's promise to 'green' the planet advances. Never has there been an Emperor as powerful as Paul Muad'dib. And yet....and yet....Arakeen still feels empty and provincial - though crammed with vulgar, bombastic monuments and surrounded by ugly monotonous suburbia that is prey to constant intrusion by the desert. And the Fremen are disillusioned (as happens so often after a revolution). There is a sense that things have taken a wrong turn. They have had their revenge on humanity, but now their lives are largely empty, devoid of meaning and direction. The Jihad failed to become the moment of re-integration with the world, as the former jihadi Farok, speaking early in the book, believed Muad'dib offered his followers. And not only Muad'dib, but, as explained in 'Dune', the Bene Gesserit have been there before him inadvertently tilling the ground in preparation for all this violence and failure when all they wanted to do was protect and promote their own. Instead of bringing liberation the jihad only furthered the alienation of the Fremen as it effectively destroyed their past in the process, leaving them suspended between that lost past and a non-existent future. In effect they merely exported Arrakid chaos to the rest of the universe. There is now a desire among the Fremen to return to ways of the desert, and towards the end of the novel we learn that the newly constructed qanats (irrigation canals) and other symbols of the new Arrakis have been sabotaged, the Golden Flower rejected. Ennui envelops and corrupts many. They are ripe for exploitation at the hands of plotters.

     And it is with the plotters, a motley crew if ever there was one, that the real weirdness steps in. In particular we are presented with two products of the Bene Teilaxu: the Guild Steersman Edric, and the face dancer Scytale (both genetically engineered mutations). Connected with the plot are two more products of the Tleilaxu; the human distrans Bijaz, (another piece of genetic manipulation) and most importantly the ghola Hayt. The other conspirators are Helen Gaius Mohaim and the Princes Irulan (both Bene Gesserit). In addition there is Korba, who like Farok we have encountered in 'Dune', a fighter from Seitch Tabr and later a Fedaykin leader and now one of the Qizara Tawfid, the priests of the new religion of Muad'dib. A long term intimate of Muad'dib then, but he and his own separate coterie of plotters are not happy either. 

     And then there is Paul Muad'dib himself that strangely disengaged prophet, complex and contradictory, conflicted and more isolated than ever: his mother, the Lady Jessica, and Gurney Halleck (one of the few survivors of the Atreides household, of any rank, to have escaped the Harkonen purge)  have returned to Caladan. The estrangement between Paul and his wife Irulan has deepened, his relationship with his concubine Chani under increasing strain. He rules by personal fiat - he is a benign autocrat surrounded by a small coterie of counsellors. He refuses both a constitution and to rule as a god. And what is more Paul's prescience has become a curse rather than a gift. He has become its prisoner, unable at times to assert his own autonomy and agency. (It is not as though his prescience is 'all seeing', indeed it is partial, selective; obviously something else is at play here, most likely the unconscious. It is certainly not an objective 'sense'. Similarly I don't view the collective unconscious, as exemplified as the collective memory of the Fremen, as in anyway objective. Perhaps like memory prescience is a creative process. In the case of the Fremen we cannot rule out the influence of the hand of the Missionaria Protectiva either.) Estranged from wider society by his semi-divine powers he draws closer to his younger sister Alia. It is impossible to not feel a deep sympathy when encountering Alia, St Alia-of-the-Knife, Abomination, object of veneration. Merely a teenage girl. Prescient and fully conscious at birth. 

     With all of that established, and bubbling away nicely, we witness the arrival of an embassy from the Spacing Guild headed by steersman Edric. Among the entourage is a gift, Hayt. The ghola. Paul recognises immediately that Hayt is in fact Duncan Idaho - his friend and weapons trainer. Dead Idaho. The Idaho murdered by the Harkonens 15 yrs previously. Restored to life. Re-animated as it were. Re-heated and served. The Bene Tleilax are good at that sort of thing, manufacturing not only humans to order but other even more morally reprehensible things: war, famine, & poverty. Soon we learn that Hayt has been trained as a mentat and in Zensunni philosophy, but importantly, for the plot at least, he has no recollection of his earlier life. The gift is accepted, and a strange relationship develops between Hayt and the Atreides that only serves to further isolate them from the Fremen, who are rightly suspicious of the Tleilaxu and their 'products'. They have a particular aversion to the ghola's eyes which in common with all of his type are metal.

     Slowly the plots converge. Muad'dib looses his sight in a terrorist explosion (A small nuclear device known as a 'stoneburner' is detonated within the Imperial capital) and then his prescience. And at the climactic, melodramatic conclusion of the novel, Paul and Duncan end their exile, their occultation. Their identities restored, they become once again fully integrated human beings. And thus restored Paul walks out alone into the desert. Perhaps we are supposed to have in mind here the death of Alexander the Great at a similar age, and the occultation of T E Lawrence at the end of WWI. Unlike Indra, the slayer of Vritra, who I discussed in my 'Dune' post, Paul rejects his cosmological dharma. It is left to others to fulfil that terrible purpose. (This is for others to explore, but I do wonder if in the relationship between Paul and Duncan there is an echo (and a faint one at that) of that between Arjun and Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita. Just a thought. Be that as it it may, Duncan can be seen as Paul's moral anchor.) 

     'Dune Messiah' has caused me reassess my attitude to Science Fiction and Fantasy writing. I still haven't changed my mind about the literary quality of both genres, but I've come to see that both fulfil important roles within the culture. It works something like this: the Enlightenment with its emphasis on reason degraded the position of myth in Western Culture, echoing both the earlier Protestant Reformation, and its jihad against 'superstition' **, and British Deism. These movements tended toward dis-association, an alienation in humanity. One that industrial, mass society has exacerbated. It helped feed the growing 'Meaning Crisis'. Romanticism 'rediscovered' myth, as a means to heal the breach. Think, for instance of the work of William Blake. It, Romanticism, had perhaps a better understanding of being human than the Enlightenment. However, dis-associative culture remained and continues today in certain sections of elite culture. In the twentieth century Carl Jung attempted to end the crisis in meaning by attempting to re-incorporate myth into what was essentially a new metaphysics. Later other thinkers have attempted the same: Joseph Campbell being a notable example whose cultural influence has been immense. It was Campbell, I believe, who pointed out that myth is the mirror of the self. In our own time both Jordan Peterson and John Vervaeke are attempting the same. I believe that both Sci-fi and fantasy are popular and 'spontaneous' attempts, largely outside elite culture and the academy, to heal that breach, to fill the vacuum created by Modernity. They are not therefore to be dismissed. Specifically I've come to see the 'Dune' sequence, in all it richness and complexity, to be very cultural important. It speaks to our time. I begin to wonder if the sequence is an extended metaphor for the Pax Americana.

*   Berlatsky is not alone in this. See Haifa Mahabir's essay 'Dune and Orientalism' on the 'Munitions of War' website. I'm not entirely sure whether she has read 'Dune' or not. I think not though.

** I've come to take the view that the Reformation in its attack on the sort of customs, such as ashing or the production of religious art, and which are common to other religions, as a form of de-naturing. Sadly attempts to re-nature ourselves, such as Anglo-Catholicism, have largely failed by being largely prescriptive and self-conscious, lacking in spontaneity (being overly concerned with the correct externals).

Dune I: The Discontents of Modernity

'I had this idea that charismatic leaders ought to come with a warning label on the forehead: 'May be dangerous to your health.''

'When religion and politics ride the same cart when that cart is driven by a living holy man, nothing can stand in their path.'

I Introduction: The Discontents of Modernity

     I've been reading around Jung for several weeks now. He is endlessly fascinating. That mix of the intellectual, the spiritual and the artistic. One way of understanding the rise of Jordan Peterson is to see it as part of a larger Jungian revival. Perhaps Jungian thought is a way through the crisis of Liberalism, of Late and Post-Modernity, that is laid upon us.  It is certain that we have culturally, spiritually and possibly politically driven ourselves up a dead end.

     So discovering that Frank Herbert (1920-1986) had read Jung, as well as Nietzsche, I decided to re-read Dune (which I had first read in the early Eighties when the David Lynch film came out), and - as a long-term project - all the sequels Herbert wrote. From doing a little research into them things get pretty weird. Not that 'Dune' isn't pretty weird of itself. There are some rather strange things going on. I should add here that Science Fiction (and fantasy fiction) is something I don't normally read, perhaps, I have to admit, out of literary snobbery. It is certainly something that serious literary types look down upon. There are a small number of exceptions to this general rule: H G Wells, J G Ballard, George Orwell, for '1984' and Aldous Huxley for 'Brave New World' - but then who reads Huxley's early works now, and who, save the New Agers, the later quasi-mystical works such as 'Island' and 'The Doors of Perception'? I suspect Herbert may have read them, or at least been aware of them and of Huxley himself down the coast in Southern California and a user of mescaline. Both men had various degrees of interest in Vedanta. One feels that Huxley's influence is close in this book, perhaps most obviously in the similarities between the Seitch Tau Orgy and the 'Solidarity Service' in 'Brave New World'.

      (I feel the influence of the Jungian psychologist Erich Neuman (1905-1960) is close at hand too, especially his book 'The Great Mother - An Analysis of the Archetype' of 1955, but more of that later. I would also add, 19.10.22, the French philosopher and mystic Henri Corbin, but I'm not sure how Herbert would have come across Corbin's work as only two of Corbin's books had been published before 1965 when Dune was published, and only one of those in English. Were Corbin's ideas already in circulation in certain proto-New Age Groups on the American West Coast?)

     Dune, then, is an exception to the rule, and I have to admit I find it fascinating. Compelling, even. Perhaps not for the quality of the writing as such (it hasn't changed my opinion about the literary quality of sci-fi to be honest) but for the ideas and imaginative vision. It is the use of Jungian ideas, archetypes and so on, that gives this story its heft, its continuing resonance. Their presence, via Campbell, helps explain why the first Star Wars film succeeded and their absence why the subsequent films waxed in failure until they reached the bathetic 'Rise of Skywalker'.

     The Lord of the Rings, which is without doubt better written, falls into that same category; and having said that I've been struck with a number of similarities between the two works. Not an obvious parallel perhaps, though both authors could be described as conservatives, though of somewhat different stripes - Herbert being a sort of Thoreau-esque frontiersman, doughty and independent. Be that as it may, both books are an attempt to address, and come to terms with, through the use of mythological metaphor, the gargantuan horrors of the twentieth century, depicting societies that are poised at the point of monumental change - a change that is only achieved by the shedding of blood in war, and in the case of the Dune sequence much blood. Untold amounts. In both books the main character undergoes a series of trials and initiations that lead to an altered (higher) consciousness. Being burdened with a power beyond their comprehension, (and that of their companions and the wider society around them), and that makes living in the real, mundane world ultimately unbearable, they are compelled in that process of change to make a bitter renunciation, rather like the knights in the Grail legends. Perhaps you can see the Ring in the LOTR as an inversion of the Grail. Another link between both books is the almost inordinate length of vision; thousands of years are traversed in which the events described are set against a vast panoramic view of history. Both books explore ideas of destiny, fate and agency. Tolkein, Herbert, and Huxley for that matter, were all concerned with where Modernity has gone wrong and in particular with the disenchanting of the world, and its effect on the individual, society and environment as humanity waxes in alienation. 'Dune' however contains themes such as religious and political fanaticism, terrorism and the rise of dictatorship that are alien to Middle Earth. It is a novel, too, saturated with the emerging drugs culture of the 1960s. 

     A novel about the opening of the 'Doors of Perception'. A rich, complex and multi-layered work then, of almost infinite interest, that reflects not only Herbert's wide field of reading but also his autodidactism - for good and ill.