Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/07/30/the-final-volume-of-the-dune-graphic-novel-lands-on-an-odd-note.html
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So, @thomdunn, do not recommend?
Seems he does except skip the last line?
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Seems like good strategy. There was some high praise in the review.
It’s a great adaptation of a great story. But the very last page pissed me off, because of that stupid line. So I do recommend it as long as you know that it should just end at the climax fight scene with no denouement.
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Dune was never the end of the story, just the first act, so in context the last line makes internal sense; if they don’t (or plan to) do Children… then that IS an unfortunate end
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This is not to disagree with your assessment of the strength of Herbert’s writing of women; but the line always struck me as considerably less incongruous given how many people in Dune are, quite deliberately, somewhere between being tools and being duty-holders; rather than agents.
Obviously the faceless ones; like all the Sardaukar whose 50% child mortality rate is totally worth it for being 10 times as effective as the equally faceless Landsraad levies, or whoever it was who ended up bricked up inside the wall to operate the hunter-seeker that almost gets Paul, or Faufreluches minions generally; but also the ones who do actually get lines, or at least significant description.
Pardot Kynes is more prophetic voice than actual person by the time the story picks up; all the Bene Gesserit (notably except Jessica, who throws the whole thing in her capacity as wife rather than initiate) are wrapped up in their grand breeding project; Duke Leto is the honorable guy because he treats the dutchy as more of burden than a prerogative until it kills him; Yueh is a plot point because he is supposed to have been engineered into carefully tailored incapacity for harm(exactly how ‘Imperial Conditioning’ works is left a trifle vague; but while it’s not the sort of really radical alteration that you need to go to the Tleiaxu to have tailored(like gholas or face dancers; or twisted mentats, even more so than the standard human-trained-for-computation) it’s not like it’s getting a passing grade on an ethics survey course); but de Vries managed to find a workaround. Guild navigators are so task-specialized as to be practically unrecognizable as human; and anyone laboring under prescience, notably Paul, is substantially bound by that as well.
In that context, of people who are largely instruments, sometimes role-holders, it seems substantially less incongruous for Jessica, who abandoned being an instrument of the Bene Gesserit project to have a son in her de-facto capacity as Leto’s wife to draw the parallel to Chani, who is similarly throwing a spanner in both the Bene Gesserit Atredes/Harkonnen crossbreeding plan and the Corinno plan to either have Irulan take the throne or at least wed advantageously enough to keep the imperial throne in Corinno hands.
It’s absolutely not a Bechdel test triumph; quite the opposite; but it is an observation by one person groomed to be a tool who instead took up a historically pivotal role to the other such person.
It certainly wouldn’t surprise me if their portrayal is even closer than that of some other characters to one-dimensionality because of how Herbert writes women or because future space feudalism was patriarchal by design, or both; but the degree to which Dune isn’t exactly crawling with free agents doing their own thing on their own terms rather than subject to their relation to something else makes it less incongruous than it is in settings where the author writes the men as agents and the women as of interest purely in relation to the agents.
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Those are all very fair points! I’ve never objected to the line itself, per se. It certainly is an important distinction to make — especially for Chani, who is both not from the same world as these royal elites, and also just lost her fucking baby (something I think the graphic novel portrays with a bit more gravitas than does the book, but which is largely relegated to the sidelines either way).
I think it throws me out of the story simply for being the very last line. It would make sense if the book was more about Jessica’s journey — as you rightly point out, her decision to reject her pre-determined role as concubine is sort of the crux upon which the enter universe hangs. But that’s a decision that she made years before the start of the story. In the context of DUNE itself, I don’t often think about Jessica as being a proactive protagonist, making intentional choices to embark upon a journey.
Not that she doesn’t undergo changes; just that the book is less interested in, say, her struggle to embrace the role of Reverend Mother that the Fremen thrust upon her. She gets her moments of interiority — largely about her feelings as they relate to her son and late husband, but still. It’s not a story that’s about her journey as a widow into dealing with an advanced age pregnancy, and then raising a frighteningly precocious toddler while your son leads a galactic revolt. In the Jessica-centered version of the book, the last line would be a barnburner in its way.
Though also, to @Flanker7’s point, it might be a weird ending to the book in isolation, but it does fit into the grander scheme of the saga.
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