why dune sucks shit redux

I told Reid I was writing a "balanced" and "fair" analysis of Dune and then I grilled him on what he liked about it.

We’re starting over. I wrote my thoughts on why Dune sucks but then I kept reading and I think Dune sucks less than I did when I first started writing this.

So I’m trying to calibrate that.

My main complaint with the early Dune chapters is the sheer volume of inner monologue presented for us, the readers, in the form of shitty little italicized chunks.

I say this to Reid and he says to me, “Frank doesn’t trust the readers to understand the characters based on their actions.”

Which is true and it’s annoying.

I think it’s easier to understand the gist of the story because he constantly insists on telling you what everyone is thinking and I’m imagining really stylistic and funny ways to do that.

Every character saying very little but then having expansive unshared thoughts that we have in the narrative could be really funny.

“I’m gassy,” he said. I pooped. Oh no I pooped.

I like that, as you get deeper into the book, Frank insists on invading the narrative less and allows for more to just naturally happen but also then he insists on doing lots of stage direction stuff where characters are standing and then sitting and then pushing away from the table and then standing sullenly in the corner before sitting sullenly at the table.

I like that Dune has me thinking a lot about ways to make omniscient third person not really annoying.

I think having only Bene Gesserit thoughts would be a really interesting way to do it. Like, in that early pain box scene, you have Jessica, Paul, and the old lady’s thoughts even though they’re all talking to each other and it’s a painfully claustrophobic scene but then when it’s normies you don’t know anything about what they’re thinking.

You could get the essence of everyone’s thoughts but it would always be interpreted by someone with Bene Gesserit force powers or whatever they’re called in-universe.

But in our earlier conversation about this we talked about how Dune would read better as a history. Dune as a history from the perspective of the Bene Gesserit maybe? Does that work.

Reid thinks it does. He’s probably wrong (he’s usually wrong).

I like Reid’s idea of the story from the perspective of the Bene Gesserit as one singular protagonist but I’m probably wrong to agree with Reid because Reid is usually wrong.

Is this a trap?

Reid thinks the two ideals might be mutually exclusive. You got your historical Dune, you got your Bene Gesserit protagonist Dune. 

I feel like, for most readers, a version told from the perspective of the Bene Gesserit would be easier to slip into and love whereas a version told like a history would be a tough sell.

I think my real issue with Dune, and this made me laugh last night while thinking about it because Dune is supposedly such a hard book to make into a movie, is that it feels like a movie-tie in novel. It feels like a film treatment. It feels like okay here are some characters and these are their motives and lines and this stuff happens. I feel like I’m reading a movie.

Reid thinks the only reason Dune is hard to make into a movie is that it’s too damn long. Yeah. I agree. Nothing about the story or how it’s even told is particularly hard for a movie it’s just endless questions like, “Where do we shoehorn in the Butlerian jihad?” and other shit like that.

Let me return to my first and main gripe with Dune, which is the italicized internal monologue bullshit from literally every character.

It would be a lot smoother if it were just Paul’s perspective, or even the Bene Gesserit as a whole. Paul can have smart, sophisticated thoughts. He can be aware of conversations happening within House Atreides about the emperor and the Harkonnens setting a trap for them on Arrakis. He can wonder who is the spy or if there is a spy.

I don’t think there’s much of anything we would miss.

We would lose shit like chapter two with the Harkonnens I guess. I don’t have an easy solution to that.

Fuck it, maybe Frank was right to do everything the stupid ass way he did it.

Maybe we come full circle and become Frank simps and defend his most questionable decisions.

I enjoy what I call “cat and mouse” novels such as Kafka on the Shore or Finders Keepers, where we have two characters we jump back and forth between until they meet somewhere.

Doing some shit like that would be cool. I had an idea.

Half the book should have been from Feyd Rautha’s perspective. Fuck that’s good.

Paul. Feyd. Paul. Feyd.

Reid sucks and doesn’t love my idea of Paul then Feyd then Paul then Feyd.

Reid’s main point is Feyd dies at the end of Dune but I still like my gimmicky idea.

I think what I like is I don’t want the Harkonnens to be totally off camera so to speak. Like, if they’re the dudes invading the planet and fucking shit up, it’s cool to see from their perspective.

Reid says the problem is that scenes give away too much information.

I think that’s true.

The more I think about it, I think the whole book could easily follow Paul’s perspective and we would just need some slightly contrived scenes that presented aspects of the Baron and so on. But I think I want to talk about that more in the next one of these.