“Les Misérables” (Barnes & Noble Collectible Editions), by Victor Hugo

928 pages, Barnes & Noble Collectible Editions Series, ISBN-13: 978-1435163690

Oh boy. Boyoboyoboyoboyoboy. I am going to review a literary masterpiece that has been praised and admired the world over since its publication in 1862, that has been adapted to the stage and the big-and-little screens in a multitude of languages and utilizing a variety of formats. I am going to review… Les Misérables by Victor Hugo. Like almost everyone I know, my first encounter with Les Misérables was not the novel Les Misérables but rather the musical Les Misérables, with music by Claude-Michel Schönberg and English lyrics by Herbert Kretzmer. Many moons later, I finally picked up an English-language copy of Hugo’s definitive work, a killer edition by Barnes & Noble that looks primo (I know, I know I know; never judge a book by its cover. Shut up; it’s a wicked awesome cover). Wish me luck, yo.

A compelling and compassionate view of the victims of early 19th Century French society, Les Misérables is a novel on an epic scale, moving inexorably from the eve of the battle of Waterloo to the July Revolution of 1830. Specifically, Victor Hugo’s tale follows escaped convict Jean Valjean and his 19-year-long struggle to put his criminal past behind him and lead a moral life; however, all of his attempts at respectability are repeatedly thwarted, especially by the dogged intensity of Inspector Javert, the legalist policeman who lacks empathy for criminals in any form and pursues Valjean over the years. But it is not simply the (understandable) desire not to be returned to the galleys that motivates Valjean; he is also the adopted father of Euphrasie – “Cosette” – after her mother, Fantine (who worked for Valjean in his factory and was fired for being an unwed mother), dies and leaves her daughter an orphan. To punish this little girl twice for no crime of her own would be the greatest of injustices, and so Valjean prospers and perseveres for her sake as much as his own.

The themes that Les Misérables puts forth are all Big Picture stuff: life, love, justice, revenge, freedom, atonement, forgiveness…jeez, I could go on and on. And, as can be expected with a Big Picture book, it is wordy, as Hugo takes great pride in not only speaking his Deep Thoughts but in the manner in which he does so. I imagine that, in the original French, this came across as much grander and more complete, but in the English translation it sometimes makes the reader feel somewhat put-upon; I mean, don’t get me wrong: this is brilliant stuff make no mistake, but perhaps these eloquent French sentences could have been better parsed down to fervent English words. Really, now, to cite one example, one must traverse a multipage digression on the construction of the Paris sewers in order to find out if Valjean and Marius Pontmercy survive the barricade. Again, all interesting stuff I assure you, but was it really necessary in this particular book? There are examples of this sort of literary daydreaming all throughout Les Misérables, but I trust you get my point.

But it is the relentless pursuit of Jean Valjean by Inspector Javert that is the motor of this car, with these two antagonists symbolizing the unsympathetic law as a scourge on the unoffending poor. Jean Valjean is originally sentenced to five years for stealing a loaf of bread in order to feed his sister and her children (characters we never meet and that are never mentioned again); it is his repeated attempts to escape that end up increasing his sentence to an overall nineteen years. When he is finally released on parole (as Parolee #24601) he ends up never reporting to the police station where he was due, thus making him a permanent felon destined to go back to the galleys for life if he’s ever caught; thus, it is Inspector Javert – pitiless, amoral law enforcement incarnate – who never forgets the convict Jean Valjean and makes it his life work to bring him to justice (it’s been said that, in Paradise Lost, Milton gave all the best lines to Satan; so, to, does Hugo with Javert, thus making Les Mis’ nemesis far more interesting than the main character).

The chase goes on for years, with Javert finding Valjean only for Valjean to escape and start a new life elsewhere in France, only for Javert to catch up to him again; it is Javert’s relentless pursuit of Valjean that is probably the most memorable element of Les Mis, more memorable than the plight of the “grisettes” and all of the other “les misérables” in the Parisian “Cour des miracles”. But Javert is more than just an unceasing and uncompromising engine of destruction, intent on bringing this hardened criminal – this scourge of bread loaves everywhere – to justice, for Hugo managed to make him into that most difficult of things…a sympathetic villain. Javert is, at heart, a man who sees it as his duty to bring criminals to justice; whether those criminals are sympathetic or not, whether their crimes are heinous or no, to Javert a criminal is a criminal is a criminal, and all must be brought low and pay for their crimes. However, while Javert illustrates one of Hugo’s many themes – the brutality of law without justice – and Valjean’s arc is the moral fable – as he is repeatedly forced to choose between self-interest and what’s right – Hugo also tells a tale of the poor, the dispossessed, “les misérables”.

But, Big Picture themes aside, Hugo’s characters are what really give Les Mis its heft. Jean Valjean is, as the main protagonist, the most fleshed-out of all of the protagonists, and I, for one, remained fully invested in his fate throughout the whole of the book (the description of his grave at the end of the book will, I think, stay with me forever). Fantine does her job well in wringing our tears out and for being the perfect stand-in for all of those uncountable women who have been used and abused and abandoned by carefree playboys since…forever. Who can hate the adorable and pathetic Cosette, a Disney Princess before there was such a thing as Disney and who could have been Caesar’s wife and “be above suspicion”. But she’s not nearly as sympathetic or interesting as Éponine, the street urchin who only has eyes for Marius who, naturally, only has eyes for Cosette. Speaking of which, Marius and his other dilettante adventurers – Enjolras, Bahorel, Combeferre, Courfeyrac, Feuilly, Grantaire, Jean Prouvaire, Joly and Lesgle – could be stand-ins for any and every know-it-all college students from the ancient world until now: we’ve got all the answers after a semester or two of social studies so shut-up and let us kids run the show you old farts. No wonder their “revolution” failed. Mustn’t forget Gavroche, the lovable street urchin, nor the Thénardiers, some of the best villains ever put to paper and an example of what sort of degradation the hopeless poor can fall in to.

There’s a reason anything great stays around – great music, great literature, great ideas – and it’s not because pointy-headed academics say it’s great; it’s because greatness speaks to one and all in a language that transcends time and barriers. And so it is with Les Misérables. The themes, the characters, the tragedies and triumphs resonate in the 21st Century as much as they did in the 19th, and for that reason Les Misérables will be with us always.

“The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans”, by David Abulafia

1088 pages, Oxford University Press, ISBN-13: 978-0199934980

Damn, what did I get myself into? David Abulafia’s The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans is 1000+ pages of (very small and very compact) text that seeks to give an all-encompassing and all-inclusive history of when and how humanity began to traverse the waters of the world – and I mean ALL the waters of the world: the book is divided into five sections and 51 chapters, each of which deals with the Pacific Ocean, the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean, along with all of the interconnected seas, to boot. Any and every culture that had contact with a puddle is reviewed here, an impressive task considering the age of the world and the comings and goings of people all about. While obviously a testament to the author’s erudition, The Boundless Sea is also that rarest of things: a detailed history on a massive subject that is also enjoyable as heck. No, really, even though this thing is as big as a cinderblock and took me 51 days to read (a chapter a day, sport), I was never once bored or thought that Abulafia should have cut this piece or that paragraph. This is good stuff, right here.

As stated above, the erudition displayed by Abulafia (the Professor of Mediterranean History at Cambridge University) is, in a word, astonishing, and he sails his ship in a way that effortlessly displays the multiple links that have combined to bring political, economic and religious change to the world, as well as trade, for without sea trade, the ability to exchange ideas and knowledge on Planet Earth is necessarily confined. It is easy to forget that, for all of the combined joy and dismay that today’s global economy may bring to modern consumers, this is, in fact, not a modern-day phenomenon. Humanity the world over has always been interconnected and traded goods and ideas with aplomb; it has only been during the 20th and now 21st Centuries that this interconnectedness has been thrust into overdrive, with modern governments evidently unable to stop the spread of merchandise and ideologies (or diseases; thanks, Coronavirus). This has the makings to undermine totalitarian regimes while also undercutting free societies, as ideas are spread and adopted without compunction as to their origins or their ultimate conclusions.

The best history entertains as well as informs, and The Boundless Sea is no exception to this oft-ignored rule, as when Abulafia tells us that Columbus was disappointed (to say nothing of delighted) to find naked natives on his travels, rather than the dog-headed horrors he had expected, and recorded in his logbook: “I have not found any monstrous men, as many expected; rather, they are all people of very beautiful appearance”. Good for you, Chris. Or when he writes that pirates the world over really did wear red cloths upon their heads and drink bottle after bottle of rum (Yo-Ho-Ho). Abulafia’s balance in painting his portrait, warts and all, is displayed as he notes the fact that “black rulers sold slaves to white merchants has not come easily to historians of the slave trade”, or the fact that agents of the East India Company were instructed to treat slaves humanely because “they are men”, not for compassion’s sake but because dead slaves were a waste of a perfectly good commodity. As has been stated before, facts are facts and don’t care about your feelings.

In his preface, Abulafia swears that he hasn’t “attempted to write what pretends to be a complete or comprehensive history of the oceans”, a claim he proceeds to bury over the next thousand pages, give or take. The good professor shouldn’t feel any sense of false modesty, however, for The Boundless Sea opens one’s eyes to the vast vistas of ocean-bound exploration, trade and travel that all of humanity has engaged in for as long as our species learned to float.

“The Arabian Nights: Tales from the Thousand and One Nights ”, illustrated by E. J. Detmold

248 pages, The Folio Society

The Arabian Nights: Tales from the Thousand and One Nights was first published by Hodder and Stoughton way back in 1924, complete with a dozen paintings by Edward Julius “E. J.” Detmold, a prolific Victorian book illustrator; The Folio Society reprinted this edition in 1999 (although mine is a second printing from 2000). A little background: One Thousand and One Nights is a collection of folktales from the Middle East first compiled during Islam’s Golden Age, corresponding in the Western calendar from the 8th to the 14th Centuries. The West first became aware of these tales sometime in the early 18th Century, and from then on they have more or less remained in the Western conscience in one form or another. The subtitle to this particular edition is telling, for these are merely selected Tales, not a complete collection:

• The History of Codadad and His Brothers and of the Princess Deryabar
• Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves
• Sindbad the Sailor
• The Story of Prince Assad and the Fairy Perie Nashara
• Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp
• The Three Calendars
• The Story of the King of the Ebony Isles
• The Story of Baba Abdalla
• The Story of Ganem, the Slave of Love

Some of these Tales are recognizable to a Western audience, while some are not; as to why these were chosen over others, that remains a mystery to all but the powers that be at Folio. I have to say that, out of literally 1001 stories to chose from, I see no rhyme or reason as to why these nine were chosen over all others; not that they're bad stories by any stretch, its just that, as with all folk tales, its the moral, or the landscape, or some other message being conveyed that is of importance, rather than character development or what have you. But it is what it is, and The Arabian Nights, along with E.J. Detmold, presents each tale respectfully and beautifully.

“Churchill’s Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare: The Mavericks Who Plotted Hitler’s Defeat”, by Giles Milton

 

384 pages, Picador, ISBN-13: 978-1250119032

When I reviewed Rogue Heroes: The History of the SAS, Britain’s Secret Special Forces Unit That Sabotaged the Nazis and Changed the Nature of War by Ben Macintyre on January 8th, 2019, amongst my complaints was that the book had no narrative arc or central character or even a group of central characters (I should also add that it seemed to have been written for an Eighth Grade audience, to boot). Well, we have non of these deficiencies in Giles Milton’s Churchill’s Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare: The Mavericks Who Plotted Hitler’s Defeat. The narrative arc follows the “ministry” through its foundation, its evolution, its triumphs and tragedies, and finally to its transformation into the modern-day British special forces. As for central characters, well, hell, take your pick: Winston Churchill, Cecil Clarke, Colin Gubbins, Millis Jefferis, Stuart Macrae, Joan Bright, Eric “Bill” Sykes, William Fairbairn, Norman Angier, Ralph Tarrant, Gus March-Phillipps, Eddie Myers, Chris “Monty” Woodhouse, Harry Ree, Tommy Macpherson - this is as complete a list of British eccentrics as you can find, and the story of their mad plans and plots to disrupt Hitler and his thousand-year Reich using what were really homemade devices and off-the-shelf explosives would seem outrageous and unbelievable if it all hadn’t actually happened.

And it wouldn’t have happened if Churchill hadn’t brought his maverick tendencies to No. 10 Downing Street: in the face of what seemed certain defeat in 1940, he immediately sought out and encouraged other lateral thinkers, men willing to be “ungentlemanly” by fighting off what seemed their inevitable doom with any and every ingenious new trick possible; these men, in turn, recruited other like-minded men and women - each of them gifted with fiendishly clever imaginations - to devise new weapons and techniques of with which to fight some of the greatest criminals and thugs of the 20th Century in an underhanded (read: ungentlemanly) manner. These weapons (often made from benign over-the-counter items like candies and condoms) were then put into the hands of men who had been trained in unexpected ways to murder and maim their enemies. Its been said that all’s fair in love and war, and Churchill and the men of his special ministry set out to prove the axiom right, as the men of this special and not-well-known branch of the intelligence services brought the war to Hitler and the Nazis in their own backyard.

Need some examples of what I’m talking ‘bout? ‘kay:

• The ambush and assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in Prague, one of Hitler’s most feared and ruthless executioners;
• The audacious St. Nazaire Raid that blew up the largest ship dry dock in the world, leaving the mighty German battleship Tirpitz quite marooned in it’s Norwegian fjord;
• The destruction of the Gorgopotamos Viaduct in Greece, thus depriving Rommel’s Afrika Corps of its principle supply link;
• The sabotage of the Norsk Hydro plant at Rjuka in Norway, keeping heavy water and, thus, the atomic bomb out of Hitler’s hands;
• The pre-invasion drops into Normandy where the men raised all sorts of hell, including delaying up to 1400 Panzers for a full 17 days;

And so on and so forth. Every chapter of Milton’s book works as a vivid short story made up of extraordinary characters, intense planning, exhausting rehearsals, crazy new weaponry and heart-stopping action; anyone interested in this little-known aspect of the Second World War, Churchill’s motivations and the founding of western Special Forces will love this book. While it doesn’t take away from the bravery, sacrifices and courage of the regular forces of the Allied nations, it does shine a light on the shadow warriors who helped to ease the way for their conventional brethren utilizing their ungentlemanly ways, while also rescuing these men and women from obscurity, which was their government’s intention when they were summarily dismissed without so much as a how do you do (a knighthood here and a check there just doesn't cut it in my book). A wonderful addition to one’s knowledge of the worst war of the 20th Century.

“Wild Bill: The True Story of the American Frontier’s First Gunfighter”, by Tom Clavin

368 pages, Griffin, ISBN-13: 978-1250178169

Really, now, who hasn’t heard of James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok? American legend, drover, wagon master, soldier, spy, scout, lawman, gunfighter, gambler, showman and even (bad) actor. All I knew of the man came from Hollywood, especially the 1995 movie “Wild Bill” starring Jeff Bridges in the title role, and the first season of the TV series “Deadwood”, with Keith Carradine as Hickok. We shouldn’t be surprised that this Gunslinger from the American West has stayed with us for all this time, for, as Clavin reminds us in Wild Bill: The True Story of the American Frontier’s First Gunfighter, Hickok was already a bigger legend to the people of his day than Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett or Kit Carson ever were, and by the time he was thirty, to boot. Make no mistake, though: Boone, Crockett and Carson were legendary in the minds of their countrymen, and rightly so, but Hickok was the first national celebrity to come along after the end of the Civil War, and only his good friend, the showman extraordinaire William Frederick “Buffalo Bill” Cody, would even come close to reaching that kind of celebrity – but barely two months after his 39th birthday, Wild Bill Hickok was dead.

I’ll admit right away that I was somewhat put-out by the fact that, according to Clavin, his biography mainly skims the surface of his subject’s life, due to the fact that it’s difficult to separate fact from fiction when it comes to ole’ JB. Hickok didn’t necessarily mythologize his own life – although he was known to tell a tall tale or two around the campfire – but he didn’t discourage others from doing so, either, to every historian’s curse to this day. It appears he was a normal enough frontiersman (albeit particularly fast and accurate with his pistols); but when an Eastern reporter profiled him for a piece in Harper’s magazine, there was no turning back, and James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok became a legend in his own time. Clavin is a good storyteller, but I think sometimes he lets his quest for a well-told tale override the facts, his claims to the contrary otherwise; however, for the most part he seems to stick to facts better than most who have written about Wild Bill, and succeeds in separating the wheat from the chaff.

Clavin ends Wild Bill with an interesting theory that, even had Wild Bill lived, he wouldn’t have aged at all well in a post-gunslinger America: there was no practical occupation for Hickok, he wasn’t a very good gambler or any kind of prospector whatsoever, and he was slowly going blind, besides. This is perhaps why Wild Bill tarried in Deadwood instead of returning to his wife in Cincinnati: he was ashamed of what he’d lost.

“Beethoven: The Universal Composer”, by Edmund Morris

256 pages, Eminent Lives, ISBN-13: 978-0060759742

Edmund Morris’ Beethoven: The Universal Composer is part of the “Eminent Lives” series of books which seeks to enlighten the masses as to the lives of eminent folk (that was rather circular, wasn’t it?). I picked this thing off of Barnes & Noble’s overstock shelf and, thus, didn’t pay a lot for it, for which I am glad, for it didn’t take me long to realized that Morris relied too much on the psychobabble pushed by Editha and Richard Sterba in their Beethoven and his Nephew: A Psychoanalytic Study of Their Relationship, and accepted without questioning some of the more controversial aspects in the writings of Maynard Solomon, many of which were addressed in Barry Cooper’s (far superior) biography, in which he investigated and put into proper perspective everything his predecessors did not. For a book that was written with the idea of for introducing Beethoven to the general public, this one falls far short of its mark. Beethoven is, of course, the Greatest Ever Composer (yeah, I said it) about whom many excellent books have been written – but THIS book is not one of them. I’m sure Morris thinks he writes beautifully, but I find it often pompous and extremely inelegant. Some examples:

“The paradox of Beethoven’s ‘bigness’ is that it is not always measurable in time or decibels”.

“So a brilliant green butterfly metamorphosed from the shabby cocoon of Ludwig’s schooldays”.

“His preferred data bank was to remain the twelve tones of the scale – so much closer, in their logical order, to the ten digits of mathematics than to the twenty-six mutable ciphers of the alphabet”.

“The fugue that ends the Hammerklavier sonata takes…sometimes all three processes going at once: the musical equivalent of trigonometry”.

“If he had to choose between the charm of a seductive tune and a figuration built out of integral coefficients, mathematical beauty won out every time”.

And so on and so forth. How can a biography of Beethoven practically ignore not only the Missa solemnis but his Ninth Symphony? While there are some interesting business and social stories here, there is actually very little in this book about, well…BEETHOVEN’S MUSIC! (I betcha Morris mentioned Beethoven’s diarrhea more times than the Ninth Symphony; he shoulda called his book “Beethoven: Chronic Bowel Irritation”). For a more accurate, better-written biography of Beethoven that incorporates his life and works (one without the other is meaningless), I would suggest the Biography by Barry Cooper (which I should probably review soon).

“Elizabeth I: A Novel”, by Margaret George

688 pages, Viking, ISBN-13: 978-0670022533

Remember when you got in trouble in school and your teacher or the principle or whomever told you that they “weren’t angry; just disappointed”? Remember that? No? Oh. Well, anyway, that’s just what I felt while reading Elizabeth I: A Novel by Margaret George. I wasn’t angry; just disappointed, because I had such high hopes from the author of the novels The Autobiography of Henry VIII, With Notes By His Fool, Will Somers (reviewed on March 7th, 2012) and Mary Queen of Scotland and the Isles (reviewed on April 10th, 2012), two absolutely brilliant works of historical fiction. One of the ways in which Elizabeth I differs from her other works is that it doesn’t give a womb-to-the-tomb account of the title character’s life; rather, George chose to start in 1588 when the Virgin Queen’s reign was half-over (maybe she thought that Elizabeth’s early life and reign had already been well-covered in historic fiction?) The trouble is that while this was by no means an uneventful period (Spanish Armada, anyone?), there wasn’t all that much happening that the middle-aged, female monarch directly took part in – which, when you consider that she’s the narrator of the book, rather drastically puts a kibosh on the story. Thus, we witness scene after scene in which Elizabeth anxiously waits for news about some crisis or other, and then hearing an account of what happened from some other character. Riveting.

George is a great historical novelist, and Elizabeth I is not without its good moments, but it often feels like she’s marking time with a series of episodes that, while interesting to a point, do not advance the story at all (like the invention of the indoor toilet!) rather than fill in historical gaps with invented, but plausible, scenarios that serve to advance the plot. Not to mention the (for George) uncharacteristically sloppy writing, anachronistic language and narrative gaps, such as when, over the course of a few pages, Elizabeth goes from barely knowing who Essex is to being as intimate with him as any she ever was with Robert Dudley. Or the out-of-left-field, what-in-the-HELL moments that burst fully formed from her mind, as when she has Lettice Knowles sleep with William Shakespeare (?!). One would be forgiven in thinking that George became rather overwhelmed by her subject – whom she dubs “the supreme mystery woman” – and was rushed to make her publisher’s deadline before she’d fully digested and figured out her take on Elizabeth, but, really, this lets her off the hook, I think. After one brilliant historical novel after another, this effort is quite beneath George’s abilities and all are justified in their supreme disappointment. Instead of a grand Tudor feast, we have been served a half-baked pudding.

“Himmler”, by Peter Padfield

656 pages, MJF Books, ISBN-13: 978-1567311181

Of all the creeps, psychos, weirdos, neurotics and nutjobs who surrounded Adolf Hitler during his rise to power – and who helped him wreck Europe – perhaps none was weirder than Heinrich Himmler, the unsmiling Reichsführer-SS, the organizer and commander of the German police, concentration camps and mastermind behind the Holocaust. Himmler by Peter Padfield is the first full-length biography of the most powerful and coldblooded of Hitler’s lieutenants; impeccably documented yet compulsively readable, this book has it all. The son of a schoolteacher (who rather looked like a schoolteacher himself), Heinrich Luitpold Himmler was, second only to Hitler, the most powerful man in the Third Reich and probably the most thoroughly evil. Before his suicide in 1945, Himmler had ruled the SS and Gestapo, headed German intelligence services, ran the slave-labor system in the Reich and directed the death camps in Poland…oh, and he also was responsible for the pseudo-medical experiments in those self-same death camps. But it gets worse, for not only did he create the hell of Auschwitz, he even went there several times to inspect its operations: one day in 1943 – according to the testimony of an Auschwitz prisoner named Rudolf Vrba – one of the gas chambers was packed with prisoners by 8:45 so that Himmler could watch a mass killing at 9…but Himmler dawdled over breakfast, so the increasingly frantic prisoners had to wait inside the chamber until the Reichsführer-SS arrived at 11:00, took his position at the peephole and observed the gassing. “What he had seen seemed to have satisfied him and put him in good humor”, Vrba recalled, “he accepted a cigarette from an officer, and…laughed and joked”.

Delving into the family background and upbringing of this terrible – yet strangely ordinary – man, Padfield analyzes the master-race theories that inspired Himmler and comes impressively close to explaining how a priggish, idealistic Bavarian boy turned into history’s most ruthless slaughterer. Passionately devoted to Hitler, to the Nazi theories of Nordic racial supremacy and to the 18-hour workday, Himmler tirelessly expanded his power until he controlled not only the private empire of the SS, with all its prisoner-operated factories and mines, but also the battlefields where his Waffen-SS divisions fought ferociously against the Allies. Buttressed with excerpts from diaries, letters and speeches, the author examines each phase of Himmler’s life in detail. Padfield describes, for instance, how Himmler expanded Hitler’s personal bodyguard (the original SS) into the all-embracing state-within-the-Nazi-state used to terrorize the party hierarchy as well as occupied Europe. The book even sheds light on Himmler’s 11th hour attempt to make a separate peace with the Allies, and on the details of his final hours. Scary stuff, but the truth must out.

“Heretics of Dune”, by Frank Herbert

471 pages, Berkley Books, ISBN-13: 978-0425087329

After the bottom-of-the-Atlantic-Trench-deep God Emperor of Dune, what was one to expect from Dune book #5, Heretics of Dune? Glad you asked. It’s been 1500 years since the death of Leto II, and his fall marked the beginning of the “Famine Times”, prompting many to leave the known universe to go…somewhere else. Now, the descendants of that Scattering have returned, in numbers that dwarf the empire they left behind. Only the Bene Gesserit stand against them, buying time while their plan comes to fruition. Once more the fate of mankind hinges on two special children: one is a young Duncan Idaho (enough with Duncan friggin’ Idaho, already!), the latest in a long line of gholas, artificially created humans; the other is a child of the desert, Sheena, who has the power to command the worms of Rakis, what Arrakis is now called in this era. Thus, Heretics of Dune has everything fans have come to expect from a Dune book: a young protagonist groomed for a specific role; a strong female who challenges authority; and a plethora of complex ideas, ranging from the nature of power and strength, to the unavoidable inequality created by social hierarchies. And yet…something is missing.

What, exactly? Throughout the story there are numerous references to a looming threat on the horizon (or rather, the next book), but within the scenes themselves there’s little sense of urgency. Dialogue dominates every scene, a mix of heated debates that hint at a grand plan and intellectual discussions that blatantly state the underlying ideas instead of quietly hinting at them. Flashbacks and summaries break up the monotony with warm memories that help to personalize each character. Unfortunately, it’s the characters themselves that create the biggest problem: most stories begin with a disruption, and spend the rest of the story trying to restore order, but the Bene Gesserit, who dominate the story, have all passed through their trials. They are stable, strong, and implacable; in every situation they know exactly what to do, and they never hesitate. Against such opponents the antagonists struggle to keep up, engaging in brief skirmishes that quickly fizzle out, before finally mounting a proper offensive at the two-thirds mark. This forces the protagonists out of their secure routines; creating opportunities for younger, more dynamic characters to take center stage. The last quarter is as strong as anything in the Dune series, with an ending that feels fitting, if incomplete. Overall, Heretics of Dune reads more like a prologue than an actual story, a necessary precursor to the real story, Chapterhouse: Dune.