Children of Dune

Two nine-year-olds stand in a sietch discussing statecraft, and they are not precocious. They are crowded.

Herbert has stopped writing about people and started writing about time. The twins carry ancestral memory from birth, so the protagonists have no innocence to lose and no learning to do, which puts a coming-of-age story off the table. What replaces it is a negotiation with the dead.

Admission here is expensive and the receipt is honest. A reader gets the series' politics, its ecology and its metaphysics running together at full strength. She hands over identification, because there is no one in this book she can stand beside.

Leto and Ghanima are the hardest thing Herbert attempted. Children who are not children, speaking with millennia of borrowed judgement, and the difficulty is making them frightening rather than ridiculous. He manages it by keeping them frightened. Not a superpower, not a gift, not a thing they can put down, but a crowd that is able to take over.

Alia's condition is where the trilogy's dread concentrates hardest. Possession written as an internal committee losing a vote, and the possessor selected for maximum obscenity. Herbert had the option of keeping this abstract. He made it a specific dead man with specific appetites.

Omniscience flattens the dialogue and the flattening compounds. When most speakers are prescient, memory-laden or trained to read a body, conversation becomes a contest over who has already foreseen the other's line, and no one can be wrong in an interesting way. Herbert answers by raising the register, so the prose turns oracular. Oracular prose has no setting beneath itself. Once all of it is portentous, none of it lands as emphasis.

Belief in the twins is the price of admission. A nine-year-old carrying four thousand years of judgement either reads as vertiginous or reads as absurd, and the premise leaves nowhere else for that response to land.

The Preacher walks out of the desert to tell an empire it is wrong about itself, and the book is careful about how much it confirms. A blind man, unwelcome, saying the unsayable inside a religion that has become a state. Herbert uses him to put the previous volume's argument into a mouth the faithful cannot dismiss.

Arrakis is being made green and the trilogy's actual thesis arrives with it. The terraforming works, working kills the worms, and no worms means no spice, so the empire's engine fails on its own success. Herbert had been building towards this from the beginning. Ecology as tragedy rather than as backdrop.

Jessica comes back and the reunion is not warm. A grandmother assessing grandchildren for signs of the thing that ruined her daughter, and the assessment is professional. Herbert writes families as institutions with succession problems, which is bleak and consistent with everything else he does.

The prose goes further into aphorism than the earlier volumes did, and the chapter epigraphs stop being ornament. Each is a document from a later historian, so the book annotates itself while it runs. That device gives Herbert somewhere to put the argument he cannot fit into dialogue, and it also tells the reader how the story will be remembered before it has finished happening.

The desert is not finished with this family. It has not been finished with them for three books.