Dune Meh-ssiah

*As always, there are spoilers ahead, so read on at your own risk.*

There are a lot of problems with Frank Herbert’s original Dune.  The gender politics and white savior narrative alone could sink the novel.  But in spite of being put off by those aspects, I really enjoyed the novel overall.  The writing itself is decent, and a handful of the characters are fascinating, but most of all, the world of Arrakis and the universe of the novel are so beautifully and completely imagined that it’s easy to forgive the other flaws.

What I found when reading Dune Messiah, the second book in Herbert’s series, is that it is plagued with the same problems as the first book without providing the same fascinatingly depicted world.  The big contribution to the universe is the Tleilaxu and their technological abilities, such as facedancing and the creation of ghola.  The moments at which the book soared were when Herbert explored and developed everything associated with the Tleilaxu. 

When it wasn’t showing us the marvels of Tleilaxu technology, the novel progressed ponderously, bemoaning Paul’s undesirable fate as a godhead, feeling bad for Paul that millions in the universe were dying from the Jihad started in his name, and making me feel grossed out by Herbert’s fascination with Alia’s newly sexualized body (not by Alia’s sexuality, mind  you, but by Herbert’s overly-fond descriptions) as well as the unmotivated romance between Alia and Hayt/Duncan Idaho, a man her father’s age (and about the age of Frank Herbert himself when he was writing the novel).

The novel posed an interesting challenge to the author.  How do you write about Paul’s reign 12 years after he became Emperor and not write a novel about trying to run a city, state, world, and universe of worlds?  How do you write about him and not have the reader hate him for standing idly by as millions are slaughtered by his followers in his name.  This latter concern is addressed by reassuring us that the slaughtering will happen no matter what Paul does or doesn’t do, so we should take comfort in the fact that he is walking the best path possible.  How much comfort you take in that is up to you.  The former concern is addressed by creating a plot to kill and undo Paul.  That was a clever approach, I think, although many of the conspirators were given short shrift, and personally, I would have liked to have seen more of Edric and the Reverend Mother.  Actually, I would like to have seen more of Irulan as well.  Scytale was clearly the focus of the conspiracy plot, and as much as I liked the character, I would have liked to have spent more time with the others, who had, I believe, far more interesting motives and personal interest in the fate of Paul Muad’dib.

The revelation of the Tleilaxu plot to break new ground with ghola technology through Hayt and Paul’s relationship was good, and the attempt to manipulate Paul by offering to bring Chani back as a ghola was fine.  Unfortunately, I never believed Paul was truly tempted by the offer, so there was no real drama present.  Having the dwarf, Bijaz, provide the same narrative beat by making the same offer after Scytale is killed didn’t contribute anything noteworthy to the tale.  All in, it was . . . okay. 

We’re reading on into Children of Dune to see if Dune Messiah or Dune itself is the fluke.  I will report back with my findings.

The Left Hand of Darkness

*There are spoilers ahead, so read at your own risk.*

I don’t know what I expected from Ursula LeGuin’s Left Hand of Darkness, but I’m really delighted with what I got.  This is the first book of hers I have read, and I found it to be intelligent, rich, complex, beautiful, and strange.

The story follows two men, Genly Ai and Therem Harth rem ir Estraven, on the planet of Gethen, sometimes called Winter by Genly.  Genly is an alien to Gethen, an envoy from the Ekumen, an alliance of planets throughout the galaxy with the goal of establishing trade relationships with all the inhabited planets.  When contact is made with a prospective member, the Ekumen sends a single representative, an envoy, to make contact.  The Ekumen knows that one alien is a curiosity while two are an invasion.  At the start of the novel, Estraven is the right hand of King Argaven, ruler of Karhide, one of the two major nations on the planet of Gethen.

 While all the inhabited planets the Ekumen has visited seem to be populated by humans, Gethenians are the only known humans to be monosexual.  For most of the month, they are sexless.  Then for a week or so they enter what they call “kemmer” and become sexual.  Two Gethenians in kemmer will find each other and one will develop female organs while the other develops male organs.  Gethenians consider only the parent that carried and bore them their parent.  The sexual role any Gethenian takes during kemmer varies, so one might have male parts in one encounter and female parts in the next.

LeGuin has an anthropological mind and does a phenomenal job of playing out how such a being would structure society differently than our bisexual society.  As a point of contrast, Genly is obviously sexist in his thinking.  His default pronoun for the Gethenians is “he,” and when something annoys him about a Gethenian he attributes it to something feminine about them.  The Gethenians don’t bifurcate the world into masculine and feminine as Genly (and bisexual earthlings) do, and they especially don’t give those divisions opposing valences: strength and weakness, good and bad, scientific and emotional, etc. etc. etc.  Gethenian society expects everyone to take a week off each month to experience kemmer without shame or judgment.  Kemmerhouses are common so people in kemmer can find each other to mate.  Pregnancy and child bearing aren’t stigmatized as everyone on the planet is expected to be pregnant and be the main child rearer at some point in their lives.  At one point, Estraven notes that Genly has an odd hang-up about crying in front of other people, and much of the misunderstanding between the two is due to Genly’s deep commitment to ideas of masculinity.  The language barrier is nothing compared to the cultural assumptions and misinterpretation of subtext.

The dismantling of gender assumption results in a really bold approach to a science fiction civilization, and I imagine the book made quite a few waves in 1969.  Because LeGuin has Genly gender everyone on the planet male by default, the romance scenes all have a trace of homoerotica.  The entire second half of the book involves Estraven and Genly alone in a dangerous trek across the northern country to avoid capture, and the two “men” grow very close.  Estraven of course enters kemmer on the trip and the sexual tension thickens.  There is a love that grows between the two, and it is a very touching relationship.  That relationship is not something that happens in passing, but is a major focus of the novel, and like Romeo and Juliet, these two people from different worlds have a love that is doomed.  The two chapters in which this love blossoms and is recognized by the two protagonists (chapters 16 and 18) are some of the most beautiful and moving chapters that I have read.

Genly grows to understand that all his assumptions are wrong.  Here’s a passage from chapter 18, “On the Ice,” in which Genly makes the critical move from being a mere envoy to being a man of genuine understanding and acceptance:

And I saw then again, and for good, what I had always been afraid to see, and had pretended not to see in him: that he was a woman as well as a man.  Any need to explain the sources of that fear vanished with the fear; what I was left with was, at last, acceptance of him as he was.  Until then I had rejected him, refused him his own reality.  He had been quite right to say that he, the only person on Gethen who trusted me, was the only Gethenian I distrusted.  For he was the only one who had entirely accepted me as a human being; who had liked me personally and given me entire personal loyalty, and who therefore had demanded of me an equal degree of recognition, of acceptance.  I had not been willing to give it.  I had been afraid to give it.  I had not wanted to give my trust, my friendship to a man who was a woman, a woman who was a man.

That resonates as much today as it must have in 1969 as gender norms are being challenged daily by all who refuse to say that we are, as a people, binary creatures.  And that’s what science fiction can always do, make the everyday alien in order to see it, analyze it, and discuss it.

I want to share another passage from that same chapter because I think it is important, although I can’t quite tell you why.  It’s something I keep thinking about.  The passage is Genly’s answer to Estraven, when asked why the Ekumen made everything difficult by sending Genly alone instead of giving him support on the planet:

It’s the Ekumen’s custom, and there are reasons for it.  Though in fact I begin to wonder if I’ve ever understood the reasons.  I thought it was for your sake that I came alone, so obviously alone, so vulnerable, that I could in myself post no threat, change no balance; not an invasion, but a mere messenger-boy.  But there’s more to it than that.  Alone, I cannot change your world.  But I can be changed by it.  Alone, I must listen as well as speak.  Alone, the relationship I finally make, if I make one, is not impersonal and not only political: it is individual, it is personal, it is both more and less than political.  Not We and They; not I and It; but I and Thou.  Not political, not pragmatic, but mystical.  In a certain sense, the Ekumen is not a body politic, but a body mystic.  It considers beginnings to be extremely important.  Beginnings, and means.  Its doctrine is just the reverse of the doctrine that the end justifies the means.  It proceeds, therefore, by subtle ways, and slow ones, and queer, risky ones; rather as evolution does, which is in certain senses its model.

And Genly is changed thoroughly.  Whereas early in the novel, the monogender of Gethenians is constantly irksome, the opposite is true in the final chapter of the novel.  Reunited with other’s from the Ekumen, he finds their voices too deep or too high, too masculine or too feminine.  He is in deep mourning for the loss of his lover and friend and is truly between worlds, tragic but better for it.

LeGuin introduces us to the world through Genly as a first-person narrator, but she wisely gives us other perspectives as well.  Estraven has his own voice through the diary he keeps, and he is equally present as Genly.  In addition to these two voices, there are a number of chapters that present Gethenian legends and folktales.  Through these tales, LeGuin creates an impressively complete world, both physically and sociologically.  I get the sense that LeGuin has considered every aspect of culture that would develop from such humans existing in such an environment.  She has a full geography and history in her head, and unlike some writers, she never throws it all on the page because she did all the work to figure it out.  She presents only what is relevant and meaningful with the ghost of other events, places, and meanings haunting the edges of what is said and what is left unsaid.

The Left Hand of Darkness tackles half a dozen other subjects as well.  There is certainly a study to be made of how the novel fits into its historical moment, namely the cold war and the Vietnam war.  The people of Gethen have never had a war and have no word for war.  This seems intimately tied into the notion of have a monosex culture as it is uncommon on Gethen to see duality rather than unity in the world.  A male-female split naturally creates an us-vs.-them in a way that monosexuality on Gethen doesn’t.  But Gethen is on the verge of change as the new right hand to King Argaven, Tibe, is seeking to push the king toward war through a newly developed sense of nationalism.  Orgota, the opposing country, is similarly poised to turn nationalism into a tool for war.  It is against this impending change to the world that Estraven is fighting to save the people of Gethen from themselves.  Estraven’s position as an outsider, a “traitor,” is yet another element of this larger discussion encouraged by the novel.

Another topic in the novel are the Handara notion of ignorance as the only thing that makes life bearable.  And what of the ability to see into the future, power coming from knowing what questions not to ask?  And what do we make of the incestuous love affair between Estraven and Arek, and the lack of taboo about incest on Gethen?  What about “perverts” and “normals” in Gethenian society and in our society?  Why does Genly sound like Arek in Estraven’s head when he mindspeaks?  What is LeGuin saying about humanity when she posits that all the populated worlds have the same essential humanity throughout the galaxy? All of these categories feel closely related and simultaneously distinct.  I love when I finish a book and feel that there is a lot of meaning to be mined from it, and The Left Hand of Darkness delivers that feeling like a bouquet of unbloomed flowers.  In fact, this is one of the few books that upon finishing, we (my wife and I, to whom I had read the book aloud) started back at chapter one.

The Kwisatz Rocks-a-lot

I am a self-proclaimed nerd.  And yet, at 45, this is my first time reading Frank Herbert’s classic science fiction novel Dune.  I have watched (and enjoyed and been confused by) the Lynch film several times, but I had not read the book.  I am delighted to have finally done so.

About half-way through the novel, I understood pretty clearly why Dune had not made the top 100 novels that I read over the last 7 years.  Dune is competently written and the world is beautifully imagined, but there is nothing remarkable about Herbert’s language or his ability to lay bare the human soul.  The sexism that pervades the novel is disappointing, but better books have displayed worse politics.  There are a number of dramatic build-ups whose payoffs are wanting.  The clearest example I can think of is Gurney’s plan to kill Jessica believing her to have betrayed the duke.  It’s a great setup, but the scene of confrontation is weak, and worse, pointless.  And there are a few cool ideas that are effectively abandoned when it’s convenient for the plot.  Here I’m thinking of Paul and Jessica’s ability to read the motives and intentions of others due to the Bene Gesserit training.  Paul’s abilities are utterly awesome when Jessica and Paul spend their first night in the desert after the duke’s death.  Then . . . well, they just sort of shrivel up and are barely accessed among the Fremen.

But for all that, Dune is deservedly revered and loved.  Herbert does an amazing job conceptualizing the world and playing out the cultural ramifications of the physical world.  It satisfies every itch of the imagination.  Herbert is also skilled at dishing out just the right amount of information.  We never learn the details of Dr. Yueh and his ilk’s conditioning, but then we don’t need to.  We know enough to know that his betrayal should have been impossible.  The excerpts from Irulan’s body of work are super cool in the way the suggest the ramifications of the tale we are hearing.  They tease us with information that affects the way we read the chapter, and they frame the story as both history and myth to the people of the novel’s world.  I also really love the way Herbert regularly gives us individual characters’ thoughts in the middle of conversations and actions.  The inner life of the characters and the unspoken subtext of their conversations become something of a theme in the book—to great effect, I think.

And speaking of themes, let me give my brief reading of what’s going on in the book.  My first impulse was to say, “there’s nothing deeper going on here than the tale of a reluctant messiah.”  But of course I was just being lazy.  As soon as I started making notes, the connections and observations came hard and fast. 

I think that Dune is about our desires to control our environment, ourselves, and each other.  The Bene Gesserit seek control via a breeding program and by planting religions on all the planets to presage the messiah they are manufacturing.  Issues of leadership and rule are prevalent throughout the novel in the differences between the ways of the Atreides and the Harkonnens, as well as between Paul’s traditional ways and the Fremen’s traditional ways.  Everyone wants to control the spice, its harvesting and its use. Jessica proves she can be the Reverend Mother of the Fremen by exerting control over the Water of Life, converting it from poison to potable water.  The Fremen themselves want to change the very nature of Arrakis and turn it from a desert into an Eden.  While Herbert never tells us (at least not in this book) how the Mentats and the Bene Gesserit achieve their super human feats, it is suggested that it is a matter of training; through them we see that the limits of humanity can be overcome through determination and skill.

But.  In all these controlling relationships there exists a tension between the controller and the controlled.  The Guild might have learned how to make the spice do its bidding to bring about folded space, but the spice has exerted its own control on them, mutating them over the years.  The Harkonnens may control the planet of Arrakis and its inhabitants, but the Fremen are exerting their own control over the Harkonnens.  The harshness of Arrakis exerts a control over the Fremen, but the Fremen have only become stronger in the face of that harshness and are now planning on changing the planet.    Again and again in the novel we see the arrogance of people who think they can control a thing being themselves controlled or changed.

The central exemplar of this tension is of course Paul.  As he walks his path, he is haunted by the possible futures before him.  To avenge his father’s death and to help the Fremen, he must assume the mantle of messiah and lead them all to victory.  But Paul always worries about the images of jihad that would mean a lot of death and cruelty.  The dangers of his position, his place as a ruler, are made tangible by his working constantly to avoid a bloody end.  Perhaps what separates Paul from all the others is that he lacks the arrogance of those who think they can control without consequences.

I keep thinking about Paul’s declaration that “he who can destroy a thing controls a thing.”  His threat that he can kill the worms and end spice production is his greatest weapon in getting the larger powers-that-be to listen to him.  He who can destroy a thing controls a thing.  Yes, but I think the novel is exploring the inverse as well: he who controls a thing can destroy a thing.  Control and destruction are two sides of the same coin in Dune, and that destruction can come to the controller, the controlled, or both.

There’s so much more to explore in the novel, so throw them out if you have them!

Norwood

When I anticipated finishing my reading project in mid 2016, I made a request for the Christmas of 2015: I wanted a copy of all of Charles Portis’s books for my shelves.  My family came through, and now that my reading project is done, I have moved on to my 6 Portis books.  I reread True Grit first but am now taking the remaining books in Chronological order.  First up, Portis’s 1966 debut novel, Norwood. 

When Norwood’s sister, Vernell, gets married, her husband, Bill Bird, moves in to Norwood and Vernell’s family home in Ralph, Texas.  Bill and Norwood do not get along, so when Norwood gets an opportunity to travel up to New York to see an old Marines buddy, he takes it.  The remainder of the novel consists of the travels of Norwood to New York and then down to North Carolina, back over to Tennessee, and finally back to Ralph.  On the way, Norwood meets with a cast of colorful characters and ends up with a fiancée named Rita Lee, and makes friends with a British little person named Edmund Ratner, and frees a chicken named Joann from an arcade fortune-telling machine.

Norwood seems to some extent to be a comic take on On the Road and other road novels of the 50s and 60s about seeing America and making sense of this post-war country.  Portis’s interest, however, is always the people and their interactions.  He has a gift for dialogue and voice, and the book is scene after scene with the people Norwood encounters.  Portis’s dry wit and Norwood’s deadpan nature makes for a lot of humor and chuckling to oneself while reading.

Like a road trip, this book needs to be enjoyed for the journey and not for any destination.  I cannot make hide nor hair of it in thinking about what the novel is doing on any large scale.  I get the distinct impression that Portis is amusing himself, that he’s enjoying the characters and dialogue as much as we are.  Character and characterization seem to be the higher aims of the novel, and while I am in the habit of wanting  something more from my literature, I found the book to be very satisfying.

If you have a breakthrough revelation about what this book is doing in its time and place, shoot me a note and enlighten me.  Go read it and get back to me, please.

True Grit Is Truly Amazing

I first read True Grit back in 2009 when I initially learned that the Coen Brothers had turned the novel into a script.  Last week I finally had the pleasure to reread it, and better yet, to read it aloud to my wife.  She sometimes suffers from insomnia, and being read to forces her mind to stop yelling at her and let her drift off to sleep instead.  And I’ll tell you, Charles Portis writes with such music in his phrases that the rhythm of each sentence is a pure joy to read out loud.  And yes, I read the entire novel with a bad southern accent.

True Grit is a true masterpiece; everything it does, it does to perfection.  The characters are engaging and full of life.  The humor is spot on.  The relationships grow and change in subtle and powerful ways.  The writing is gorgeous and insightful.  The tone and Mattie’s voice are consistent and gripping.  Mattie Ross, our fearless narrator, is one of the finest literary creations ever.  From her opening paragraph, to her financial wrangling with Col. Stonehill over his debt to her and her family, to her handling of Rooster Cogburn and her unflinching dealings with LaBoeuf, to her facing down of Tom Chaney who had murdered her father—in all these things, Mattie is breathtaking in the sheer amount of ass-kicking she does.

Because I love the novel so dearly, I am hesitant to look into the political and ethical stances that lay at the foundation of the story.  This story is American to its very core, depicting a frontier life of self-reliance, revenge, and unexplored morality plucked from the bible.  Rooster Cogburn is a lawman who certainly has his own moral code, but who is only too happy to be judge and executioner as well.  When Mattie consults with the Fort Smith sheriff to find herself a Marshal to hunt Chaney down, she asks for the “best,” to which the sheriff replies, 

I would have to weigh that proposition . . . .  The meanest one is Rooster Cogburn.  He is a pitiless man, double-tough, and fear don’t enter into his thinking. . . . Now L.T. Quinn, he brings his prisoners in alive.  He may let one get by now and then but he believes even the worst of men is entitled to a fair shake. . . . He will not plant evidence or abuse a prisoner.  He is straight as a string.  Yes, I will say Quinn is about the best they have.

Mattie of course responds, “Where can I find this Rooster.”  For all of Mattie’s moralizing asides, she does not want morality to enter into this quest for revenge.  In case we doubted the sheriff’s characterization, we get the courtroom transcript of Cogburn’s testimony in the trial of Odus Wharton, in which it is clear that Rooster is not “straight as a string.”

There is great humor in Mattie’s choice and in Cogburn’s courtroom testimony, and Portis makes it clear who these characters are and what they want.  That Rooster rode with William Quantrill in the Civil War and defended Quantrill against LaBoeuf only reinforces who we know Rooster to be.  And don’t even get me tangling with Mattie’s outspoken devotion to the almighty dollar and capitalism.  So the question is this: is Portis making a larger statement about morality and America?  I don’t know.  It seems to be that it’s doing something there, but what exactly that is isn’t clear to me.  The story is first a foremost about this stunning protagonist and her unlikely friendship with these two brutal men.  The story softens them all, and Mattie’s restrained narrative voice only makes that softening that much more powerful.

I am planning on reading Portis’s other 4 novels as well as the published collection of his short stories and other writings, so I expect who Portis is and what is important to him will become clearer to me in time.

Whatever his politics and intentions, he is one hell of a writer, and so far, that’s good enough for me.