Books on Film: Dune

He is the Kwizatz Haderach 

He is born of Caladan

And will take the Gom Jabbar

He has the power to foresee

Or to look into the past

He is the ruler of the stars.

                             Iron Maiden, To Tame a Land

Dune, as Frank Herbert’s son, Brian, observed, is to science fiction what the Lord of the Rings is to fantasy (Arthur C Clarke agreed with him). And as with Christopher Tolkien and the Lord of the Rings, Brian Herbert continued the Dune books after his father died.

As with Tolkien and fantasy, science fiction existed long before Frank Herbert entered the scene. Yet no writer before or since has done so much to enrich the genre. Every futuristic film or TV series released since 1965 carries at least trace amounts of Dune DNA. George Lucas ‘borrowed’ so heavily from Dune and other sci-fi worlds for his first Star Wars film that Frank Herbert created a tongue in cheek organisation called, We’re Too Big to Sue George Lucas.

Tatooine, the Jedi, the Sith, the Empire and Imperial forces, as well as the Pit of Salaccc (a barely disguised sand worm) are all repurposed elements from the first Dune novel. Even more of it was apparently included in the original drafts for A New Hope, including reference to a shipment of Spice and liberal use of Imperial Houses, a la House Atreides.

The idea of imperial houses did eventually find its way into the various incarnations of Star Trek, through the Klingon Empire. There would be no House of Mogh, Martok or Duras (to say nothing of the House of Quark) without the influence of Dune. Moreover, the Klingon language draws significantly from the influence Arabic as used by Herbert in his world building depictions of the Fremen and their desert culture.

Star Wars notwithstanding, various attempts have been made to bring Dune to the screen, big and small, over the years. Before Denis Villeneuve’s 2021 film covering the first half of the novel (Part 2 is due for release in 2023), there was David Lynch’s 1984 big screen adaptation, as well as the miniseries made by the Sci-Fi Channel in 2000. Both fail to do justice to the book. The Lynch film is a mess, partly because the studio imposed its own edit on the film (though personally I find most David Lynch productions to be equally incoherent), partly because it was made to conform to a standard of 1980s sci-fi films (compare Lynch’s Dune with Blade Runner, The Terminator, or Return of the Jedi, for instance, not to mention later films like Robocop). 

The ‘84 film, however, is a masterpiece compared to the version made by the Sci-Fi Channel at the turn of the millennium. While it manages to stick pretty closely to the plot of the book, it fails in almost every other regard. Despite a number of accomplished actors lending their considerable talents to the production, the whole thing plays out like an amateur dramatic society’s attempt to act out the novel while suffering through a series of hallucinations brought on by food poisoning. It doesn’t help that the sets and special effects are kitsch as kitsch can be. Like off cuts rejected by Babylon 5 for looking too cheap. It manages to make the Star Wars prequels for a moment (and only a moment) look professional and well thought out, rather than another fevered dream created by someone who’d apparently never seen the original films.

All of which makes the prospect of creating a new version of Dune daunting, if not a little insane. This book, which many consider unfilmable (though come on, it’s not Ulysses or Infinite Jest), has resisted cinematic fidelity for more than half a century. Why should it reveal its true self now?

Yet this version (at least the first part released so far) is a masterpiece and an instant classic of science fiction cinema. There are some changes to the book, which cannot be avoided in lifting a book from the page, but it hits all the main beats of the original narrative and far more is retained than one would expect. It is, for instance, a minor plot point that Paul Atreides mother, Jessica, is not married to his father, Leto. That fact though is included in the dialogue despite making little difference to the plot one way or another. It is such minor attention to detail that makes this seem like a film made with fans in mind. It’s possible to watch the movie without having read the book, but this feels, finally, like a love letter to Dune and its readers. Though like 2001: A Space Odyssey, a reading of the novel helps to flesh out the film.

While the 1984 version might have been weighed down by contemporary 80s science fiction, the 2021 update instead luxuriates in its homage to science fiction and fantasy from the last half century. The opening scenes on the planet Caladan seem to nod to the landscapes of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films and to the TV adaptation of Game of Thrones. The sleek, tall ships that land on Arrakis (aka Dune), clearly take their influence from the Imperial craft found in Star Wars (Dune perhaps returning the favour and stealing back from George Lucas). And who can witness the central structure of the Atreides stronghold on Arrakis and not see the Tyrell Corporation pyramid from Blade Runner rendered in sandstone?

Beyond even cinematic homage, however, are the references to recent world history. A Hollywood blockbuster about an imperial power overtaking stewardship of a desert world and its Middle Eastern inspired inhabitants can hardly avoid weaving into its tapestry elements of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. House Atreides brings with it an invading force and if the stronghold is not actually under siege (not by the indigenous population at least), the obvious analogue is with the American Green Zone established in Iraq following the 2003 invasion.

Again, it is hardly important to the plot, but the attention to detail contributes to the world building and continues a fine tradition in science fiction of taking contemporary human concerns and transporting them to a sufficient remove in space or time so we can consider their implications from a distance. Even cinematic war tropes are threaded in, with Stellan Skarsgård’s portrayal of Baron Harkonnen borrowing so heavily from Marlon Brando’s portrayal of Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, you expect him to moan, “The horror.” at any moment.

Dune is perhaps more depressingly relevant than ever, written as it was by a man concerned with the environmental issues of his day. The desert might be seen as a metaphor for the slow erosion of the natural world. Even today, we see China building defences to prevent the encroachment of the Gobi desert into its towns and cities and sub-Saharan countries planting acres of trees along the desert for the selfsame reason. While the omnipresent threat of nuclear war might have abated somewhat since the 1960s, climate change is just as real and disrespectful of public opinion or political bargaining. Dune and Arrakis are manifestations of a world reclaimed by nature and rendered all but uninhabitable without survival equipment. We should heed the warning, but probably we never will.

The inclusion of many actors of colour and of Middle Eastern heritage to the cast of this Dune is important, though I’m sure the usual suspects were crying, “Woke!” like a nervous tick. Yet when we consider one of Herbert’s influences for the plot of Dune was the life of T E Lawrence, particularly the film, Lawrence of Arabia, where most of the Arabian characters are played by white actors in black face (most notably Alex Guinness, who would, of course, go on to play Obi Wan Kenobi in Star Wars), it is a step in the right direction. I always think we should take a tally of all the non Caucasian people who have been played by white actors in the history of movies, TV and theatre and when that amount falls into arrears with all the white characters played by people of colour, then the anti-woke brigade can have cause to complain. Even then, we should probably ignore them.

The Villeneuve adaptation isn’t entirely perfect. Jessica is a little too passive a character in the first half of the film and unlike the ideal for a witch of the Bene Gesserit. Paul likewise is a little too Emo. Though as he is fifteen in the book, his portrayal by Timothée Chalamet is perhaps a closer approximation to a sulky teenager than either Kyle MacLachlan or Alex Newman in the film and TV series respectively. Chalamet seems closer to the character described in the novel, although in reality he is only the same age MacLachlan and Newman were when they played the role.

No film is ever going to be an exact replica of the book. Nor should it be. Screen and book have different grammar and syntax associated with them. Like the difference between mainstream music and jazz. Though in rereading the novel, Frank Herbert was obviously influenced by the visual language of cinema. Dune is a book that moves from scene to scene more like a film than the fluid narrative structure of many novels, where one chapter blends seamlessly into the next. Dune often jumps in place and time with barely a mention of what happened in the interim. Like Ishmael’s journey from Manhattan to New Bedford, that is dispensed with in a sentence in the second chapter of Moby Dick[1], so House Atreides are on Caladan one moment and already arrived at Arrakis in the very next chapter.

It is therefore odd to think how long Dune has resisted a truly faithful big screen adaptation, given its cinematic construction. We can only hope this year’s sequel sticks the landing as gracefully as Part 1 managed the takeoff.

I am perhaps lucky in the sense that I have avoided watching previous versions of Dune until very recently and only after seeing the Villeneuve film for the first time. Both the Recency Fallacy and First Love Fallacy come into play. There are no previous versions to erase from my memory. This version of Dune is the definitive one. All other versions are poor imitations. Vive la Villeneuve. 

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[1] “Quitting the good city of old Manhatto, I duly arrived in New Bedford.”

 

In Praise of Penguin Books; or How to Build a Private Library

When I think of how and when I first read some of my favourite books; some of my favourite authors, more often than not those initial experiences came through a Penguin Books edition.

Reading Frankenstein in the custard yellow £1 Popular Classics edition. Reading The Raven and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in 60 pence Penguin mini booklets. The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, bought as a student from a second hand bookshop for £10 of precious food money; the orange spines of the four mouldering volumes bound together in a crisscross of elasticated rubber.

I have an aversion to all kinds of marketing and brand loyalty and yet Penguin Books have probably had a greater influence on my development as an adult than any other corporate entity.

I wasn’t much of a reader as a child. I had phases and obsessions like everyone else, but it never seemed to last very long. I was twenty eight before I even finished The Lord of the Rings, having read The Hobbit at the age of eleven, which was to all intents and purposes the first real book I ever read. An edition borrowed from a neighbouring child, shocked I hadn’t read it. I want to say it was a Penguin or Puffin edition, but I don’t think it was. I don’t really remember.

Partly because of the Hobbit, partly because of that childhood friend, my first real obsession was Choose Your Own Adventure books, especially the Fighting Fantasy series. During the time that I read them, those books were published by Puffin, the children’s wing of Penguin. I collected the first two dozen FF books in the series, as well as the guides and special editions, all of them displayed in a glass fronted bookcase in the same way that adults display commemorative plates. I still have my original copy of House of Hell, having still not completed it after nearly forty years of trying. I was never very good at computer games either.

Into my late teens and early twenties, I read fewer Penguin editions than any time before or since. For a time I was obsessed with horror novelists, reading Pan edition James Herbert novels bought from local market stalls, before progressing to the superior Clive Barker books bought new. The James Herbert novels are since consigned to charity shops. The Barker novels, however, are still an important part of my collection. My Harper Collins paperbacks are in serious state of disrepair. The opening pages in some cases are held together by sellotape, I have read and reread them so many times over the years. Yet they retain a prominent place on my bookshelves.

Having read little as a child, I stared to read more and more as I progressed into adulthood. Moreover, I began to collect (some might say hoard) books. Those custard yellow classics become an important and cheap source of reading material. As well as Frankenstein, I read Edgar Allen Poe, Gulliver’s Travels and Mrs Dalloway in similar volumes. Penguin published a parallel series of poetry books in power blue covers. Through those editions I first read Keats and Blake, as well as the war poets and the romantics.

One December, home from university, I presented my mother with a list of seven or eight Charles Dickens novels I wanted as Christmas presents, expecting her to choose two or three from the list. I received the lot, made up of the custard yellow editions. Not bad for a total outlay of less than I had recently spent on the collected Orwell. Those books stayed with me for years, until they were replaced by my great uncle’s centenary edition of Dickens’s complete works, passed on by relatives who knew I would take care of them.

At university, I developed a true collecting obsession borne out of sentimentality and gratitude. Penguin Modern Classics book were at the time printed with mint green covers. In those editions, I first read all of Orwell’s novels, as well as his trilogy of socialist non-fiction: Down and Out in Paris and London, The Road to Wigan Pier, and Homage to Catalonia. I bought my first copy of Ulysses from a second hand bookshop in Cardiff on the way home from lectures and my first copy of Finnegans Wake brand new from the local Waterstones, both in those mint green editions. I ate up Ulysses in no time, but it would be more than a decade before I finished Finnegans Wake (which still makes it an easier read than House of Hell). 

In those same mint covers, I read Kafka’s The Trail, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and The Crucible, and three of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe novels in one volume. Penguin replaced the mint green editions more than twenty years ago, but I still rescue copies from secondhand bookshops, even if I don’t know the book or the author. As such, I have read Collette’s Collected Stories, the Letters and Journals of Katherine Mansfield, and Tadeusz Borowski’s darkly comic holocaust stories, This Way for the Gas Ladies and Gentlemen, when each might have been missed in favour of books and authors more well known to me. Even now, a collection of DH Lawrence’s short stories in mint green sits on one of my many To Read piles.

The silver editions that replaced the mint green Penguin Modern Classics seem less romantic, but it is less to do with aesthetics as it is personal history and the rosy tinted view with which we regard first experiences. Like first love or the particular incarnation by which we are introduced to a film franchise, how we experience anything for the first time leaves a indelible imprint on the imagination. The First Love Fallacy.

The mint green editions hold a special place in my heart and yet it was in the silver editions that I first read East of Eden, which remains my favourite Steinbeck novel (and one of my favourite novels of all time). I own most of Steinbeck’s fiction and non-fiction and the books that aren’t in old Pan or Grafton editions are all silver Penguins. See also, the second volume of Philip Marlowe novels. Allen Ginsberg’s Deliberate Prowse. Philip K Dick’s, The Man in the High Castle.

Over the years, I’ve also picked up older Penguin Classics and Modern Penguin Classics from secondhand bookshops across the country. Before mint green, the modern classic novels were grey and white with the only colour coming from the cubist and modernist cover artwork. These were my introduction to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, the second and third volumes of Sartre’s Road to Freedom the trilogy (the first part, The Age of Reason, sits among the mint greens), and Brave New World.

While collecting secondhand books, I began a trend that started out as an accident but has become something of a superstitious habit. One of my favourite authors is Fyodor Dostoyevsky. I own copies of most of his novels, shorter and non-fiction, but I do not own any two books that are published by the same publisher and in the same edition.

Like the modern classics, the regular Penguin classics have changed over the years, so that I have a copy of Notes from the Underground and The Double printed together in a black Penguin Classics edition; a copy of The House of the Dead in the previous black and yellow covers; and several other books in earlier editions.

My copies of The Brothers Karamazov and Demons are published by Oxford University Press, but in subtly different editions. My version of the Idiot is printed by Wordsworth. I also have various other novels and short story collections in paperback and hardback from a hodge podge of publishers. It has become something I take far too seriously. That I cannot obtain a new Dostoyevsky book unless it is from a publisher or in an edition I don’t already own. No reason for it. Just because.

In arranging my books, I organise by publisher first, then edition, then alphabetically from right to left (some weird quirk of being left handed). It is the Penguin editions that occupy the central bookcase in my library, with classic and modern classic box sets sitting on top. I have collected so many Penguin books, there isn’t room for them all on the shelves and they overspill to lie sideways on top of the other rows.

Other publishers are available. Yet the default for any book available from multiple publishers will always be Penguin. I once bought a copy of War and Peace in a Wordsworth edition from a charity shop. However, the text was far too small and the font and paper quality used by Wordsworth always seem to cause me problems. The Count of Monte Cristo in a similar edition took months to get through, forever delaying the reading for something with better quality print. Which is a pity, because The Count of Monte Cristo is a masterpiece.

As such, I replaced the War and Peace Wordsworth with a two volume Penguin edition from a secondhand bookshop. Then I was able to read all 1,666 pages in four days over a long weekend. More impressively, I didn’t get through even a hundred pages on one of those days. More than five hundred pages a day over the other three. A personal record.

Other than Penguin, I have constructed what I consider an impressive library over the years. Books bought brand new and from charity and secondhand bookshops. Some special editions from the likes of Folio Book that cost a lot at the time but which have only accumulated in value over the years. In a charity shop in Sunderland in 2000, I bought a copy of Wide Sargasso Sea for 25p. From what I can tell, the book is part of an early print run of the first edition and worth a couple of hundred pounds.

Such finds are rare and in the Internet Age less likely to be missed by booksellers. But everyone can build a private library for relatively little money, if you know the right places to look. In one place where I lived, there were two places within walking distance that were practically giving books away. Five books for a pound in one charity shop that was only open on certain weekends. I found so many books there I would often throw them money on the way past even when I wasn’t buying anything. There I got a massive French dictionary for 20p. Also, a Penguin classics boxset, including Wuthering Heights, Pride and Prejudice, and Robinson Crusoe that was mine for £1. It sits like a monolith on top of the Penguin bookcase.

The other place was even better (or worse). Essentially a junk shop with boxes of books of which the owner just wanted to get rid. My housemate found it and dragged me there to pan through boxes, looking for gold. I would take a backpack with me to fill up with on Pan Agatha Christie books and come away with change from a £2 coin.

When I used to visit family in Liverpool, I had a walk planned out where I could visit four or five bookshops in a one hour circuit. One of my nine copies Moby Dick (the correct number of Moby Dicks one should own) came from those foraging expeditions. Also, Jason Burke’s excellent history on Al-Qaeda.

One birthday in 2005, I took myself on a trip to Hay-on-Wye. A cold, dark February. Largely deserted. Spending two days wandering around the town’s plethora of bookshops. So many options. So many choices to make. Buying the first Foundation books. Schindler’s Ark. Chandler’s final, unfinished Philip Marlowe novel, Playback. Seeing books like Brenda Maddox’s biography of Nora Joyce that I would buy online many years later.

A strange trip. Getting the train to Hereford. Sat reading the introduction to the Cambridge Press edition of Hamlet in a café, waiting for one of the handful of buses a day that go to Hay-on-Wye. Filled to the gills on Full English Breakfasts and my ear talked off by the landlady of the bed and breakfast where I was staying. Meaning to go back some day. A day yet to come.

How many other books have I bought on similar trips? Da Vinci biography from Clos Lucé. Chomsky in Florence. A Griel Marcus book on Dylan from Greenwich Village. Not to mention the many bookshops to be found in Amsterdam.

I remember one place I stumbled upon, which consisted mainly of Dutch language books. However, there was one lone bookshelf of English language editions. One shelf was almost entirely filled with Paul Auster novels. I was distraught. I wanted them all, but only had limited space in my backpack. I had to make do with a sole copy of Leviathan.

In Amsterdam’s American Book Exchange, many an American edition can be found. American and Canadian backpackers bring them with them from across the Atlantic and swap them out for newer books from the same shop. A treasure trove of secondhand books, replete with basement repository of science fiction and horror novels. One of my favourite places to idle away an afternoon, racked with indecision and guilt for those I leave behind.

Of course, the Mecca of European bookshops is the Parisian Shakespeare and Company, opposite Notre Dame cathedral. Not the original Shakespeare and Company, but baring the same name as Sylvia Beech’s shop that stood on the rue de l’Odéon until it was closed in 1941 following the Nazi invasion of France.

From that original location, Ulysses was first published, Beech financing its printing and publication. Not only a bookshop, but a lending library, Beech’s Shakespeare and Company was a familiar haunt for many writer’s of the so-called Lost Generation. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, all borrowed books from  Beech with varying levels of diligence about returning them on time. Hemingway was apparently one of the worst.

The original location is now a boutique, but George Whitman opened the current Shakespeare and Company in 1951 and continued to run it until his death in 2011. Part of the ritual of a transaction is to receive a Shakespeare and Company stamp on the flyleaf of the book you have bought. I have a few such books, but my copy of Campbell and Robinson’s A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake takes pride of place.

As well as physical bookshops, there are many places that sell books online. Although Abe Books is unfortunately owned by Amazon billionaire, Jeff Bezos, it is undoubtedly a valuable source for finding rare books that are otherwise out of print. As a reader and amateur scholar of James Joyce, I have found many reference books via Abe Books that I couldn’t have found anywhere else. I own three glossaries of the Gaelic, German, and Scandinavian words in Finnegan Wake, each of which are former library books and which had over the decades been borrowed a total of eight times between them before being withdrawn and put up for sale. I have also been able to find cheap, well preserved copies of most of the standard academic texts on Finnegans Wake from the same site.

My father was a great reader, though our tastes are somewhat divergent. He had a large collection of books on the kings and queens of England and was an avid collector of books on Horatio Nelson. Still, I did inherit from him my first copies of the collected Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde, as well as two copies of the collected Sherlock Holmes stories.

Many of his books were given to his local model building society after he died, but a few remained. Among these was a handful of Time Life Seafarers books that had stood on the bookshelves since the late 70s. Large black hardbacks, filled with glossy pictures. I often flipped through those books as a kid, enjoying the books on pirates and Vikings the most, like any boy with a vivid imagination. At some point I set out to actually read those books. Being more than forty years old, the veracity of the text has slipped somewhat, if it was ever very accurate to begin with.

Still, they are enjoyable for what they are and I wondered how many more there were in the series other than the ten we owned. A little research revealed a total of twenty two volumes. With the help of Abe Books, I set out to complete the set. Most were bought for a few pence plus postage and packaging from places like Tallahassee Public Library. All in remarkably good condition. Books that I will probably never read again, but like collecting mint green Penguin Modern Classic editions, the endeavour was done for entirely sentimental reasons. If nothing else, they serve as ballast at the bottom of one of my myriad bookcases.

I dislike brand loyalty and yet more of the books on my shelves are Penguin than of any other publisher. I drink out of a Bonjour Trieste cup. I have a cupboard full of similar Penguin Books mugs. I have boxes of postcards displaying Penguin covers that are affixed to the exposed sides of my bookcases.

Penguin were the first company in the UK to print cheap paperback editions of the classics and make them accessible to mainstream audiences. In 1960 they dared the wrath of the UK censors by publishing Lady Chatterley’s Lover and went to court to defend the public’s right to read it.

British and international readers owe Penguin an enormous debt of gratitude, not only for printing all kinds of paperback novels, but for filling the secondhand bookshops of the world with books that are in constant state of recycling. For hoarders like me, who are not rich and yet want to read and display the books twe have read, Penguin are an invaluable resource. As such, anyone can build a private library on a budget, should they so desire. 

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