Chapterhouse: Dune by Frank Herbert (Dune #6)

The six volume saga of Dune ends with a flabbergastingly unexpected three-page obituary to Frank Herbert’s recently dead wife.

After just over 400 pages of what is simultaneously both a satisfying and disappointing finale to his seminal series of SF literature, this unexpected pivot to raw, real, and in-depth human emotionality comes as a shock, and it’s all the more potent for that.

Anyone – maybe not anyone but most people – reading this know that Frank Herbert died very soon after completing the manuscript for Dune 6, which would have been within a year or two of his wife’s death.

It’s… it’s… strange, to have spent so many thousands of pages (well about 2,000) with the voice of Frank Herbert, yet never learning anything about him elsewhere in these… in these… books. There isn’t a coda or an afterward like this in the other five volumes, and I think the impact of this ending is… is… absolutely magnified by that by how unexpected it is…

I’m just weeping weeping weeping as I try and as I try and contemplate the the the the emotion…

I think one imbues a writer with a lot of presumed empathy, I think… I know… I at least know… I’ve spent…

How long does it take to read 2,000 pages of Dune? in total three or four days if you didn’t sleep maybe, but it’s a lot of time to spend with someone and in all that time that person doesn’t mention anything about themselves at all and then all of a sudden they do but only at the end and it’s sad and it’s scary and it’s terrifying…

the life he evokes in these three pages is one that seems, for me at least, aspirational, beautiful, and caring…

Obviously, I’ve got no idea if the way in which Herbert writes about his marriage here is reflective of any kind of reality, if he’s sugarcoating that relationship or if this is true, but that’s the thing about powerful literature: it ultimately doesn’t matter.

If something moves you, it moves you, and it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter if something really happened if something really feels…

In these three pages, Herbert writes about arriving at the maternity ward before his first child is born (Brian, the Dune approved fanfic charlatan and exploiter of Herbert’s legacy) and how he and his wife were giggling and laughing in the hospital, so excited they were for life…

It’s a beautiful image, bookended with great pathos when combined with the immediate image Herbert provides where he describes nursing and looking after his wife, like an infant again, as her body falls apart with age and illness…

It’s a fucking powerful piece of writing, and though I don’t know if it would be as impactful read out of context – or if I read it out of the context of being weeks away from also hopefully arriving giggling to a maternity ward/birth centre/big paddling pool somewhere in South London for the arrival of a child who I hope won’t write terrible sequels to to my published works, but yes, the final three pages of Dune were the best bit and they were the least Duniest bit of it all…

–///–

I ruined the end of Dune 5 for myself by glancing at the back of Dune 6 before I had finished Dune 5, which says in the blurb – and this is a spoiler for Dune 5 – “after destroying Arrakis…” thus, I knew that the titular Dune would not make it to the end of book five…

Dune 6 is the final book Frank Herbert wrote in this series… it is about the Bene Gesserit constructing a brand new desert planet on which to grow giant worms to harvest their spice.

Dune 5 was about the Bene Gesserits warring with the Honored Matres, their rivals and major splinter group who’d been living off outside of the known universe for centuries, and this book follows straight on from the events of that book, with the guy who saved everyone at the end of that story, Miles Teg (who died in the finale of the previous book) now, like Duncan Idaho, having become someone doomed to millennia of repeated cloning and rebirth due to his value to other people…

There aren’t as many varied characters and perspectives as elsewhere in other books in the series, and there is a real strong focus on one particular person here, the current leader of the Bene Gesserits, Odrade. She is trying to figure out a plan to defeat the current threat to her power and her organisation, and finds another ancient society, akin to the Bene Gesserits, to work alongside. But unlike all of the other “Ancient Societies” from Frank Herbert’s Dune, the one introduced in this final volume is one that dates back to our time, to current realities… You may be as surprised as I was to learn that in book 6 of Dune, the Bene Gesserits make an alliance with “the Jews”.

So, yes, it is Dune. It’s Dune 6.

There’s space travel and spice and aliens and in this one there are weird human-cat hybrids called “futars”, there are destroyed societies and there are planetary wars and intrigue and all the other kind of crap you expect…

It does kind of five into the “lore” of the series in the way that some of the earlier books that I didn’t enjoy as much did, and this isn’t as action heavy as Dune 5, my personal favourite…

It is though, exactly what one would expect from this series (with the exception of the “big reveal” of a man who is a Rabbi included as if a crazy narrative twist)…

Duncan Idaho is there, shagging, of course, spice is there, worms are there, people fuck people over, people have strange supernatural and supernatural-adjacent powers…

It’s… it’s Dune. Yeah.

it’s Dune baby. It’s Dune

Could I see myself ever reading one of Brian Herbert’s follow-up books? I think it’s very unlikely. Six Dunes feels like enough…

Though, giving how powerfully emotive and engaging I found the unexpected real world obituary that ends the book, I would absolutely not be untempted to read one of Frank Herbert’s non-Dune texts.

Yeah, it’s good. It’s Dune exactly what it promised to be Dune.

Bye bye