Lost in Dune
Dune arrived in the mail. Eight hundred and eighty-four pages with three appendixes, a guide to terminology, cartographic notes to a world that didn't exist, and an afterword by Frank Herbert's son. The novel was thick enough to be a murder weapon in an episode of Perry Mason! The Case of the Bludgeoning Book!
Goddamn you Mark, you Dune Chronicles-loving son of a bitch!
Handling the book before reading it, I felt like a scofflaw in Puritan-era Salem and the zealots were going to lock me up in stocks, lay on a few lashes, and have me read Dune as punishment for violating some typically uptight Puritan law.
I was out the back deck on a sunny afternoon when I cracked open the whale. I had a double vodka tonic as a reading guide.
Thirty three pages in...and...I was done...undone by incomprehensible passages such as:
“In a few days Standard, the entire household of Duke Leto will embark on a Spacing Guild liner for Arrakis. The Guild will deposit them at the city of Arrakeen rather than our city of Carthag. The Duke's Mentat, Thufir Hawat, will have concluded rightly that Arrakeen is easier to defend.”
I'd finish Infinite Jest and Don Quixote before I'd get a hundred pages through Dune. And there were five more volumes of equal length!
How in the world had Mark read the series? How in the world had he read it three times? Why did these novels mean so much to him? Surely there was something crucial to understanding him and his current plight if I read the menagerie of Dune's characters, plot, settings, language, themes and mysticism. I mean, if anyone wants to understand me, they would do well to read all of Jim Harrison's first ten works of fiction several times like I have. It's all in there.
I did read the interesting afterward of Dune and learned that Chilton's, primarily an automotive publisher, was the only publisher willing to take a chance on the debut novel in 1965.
Frank Herbert then made science fiction history because someone in automotive publishing saw genius and total originality.
Mark knew it all along.
You're a finer man than I am Gunga Din!
Which is just what I quoted to Mark when I told him I couldn't do it with Dune.