Dune doesn't open in Australia, though, until December 2nd. It's a deadline that's approaching fast for a reason that would not apply to most people ... although maybe more than I would have thought.
See, on October 12th I watched Jodorowsky's Dune, the great 2013 documentary that interviews members of what would have been the principle creative team for Alejandro Jodorowsky's adaptation of Frank Herbert's seminal science fiction novel. It would have gone before cameras in the mid-70s, years before David Lynch's disastrous 1984 version -- even before Star Wars. The world was not ready for it at the time -- potential financiers thought Jodorowsky was crazy -- so all that remains is a massive bound bible of storyboards Jodorowsky had made, the memories of the people who would have been involved, and this film.
It was enough to get me to buy Herbert's book on Amazon when I finished my current book a few days later.
If the film were releasing in Australia in October as it has in the U.S., I wouldn't have done it. I would have had to plow through its 575 pages in less than a week, when that length book would normally take me a couple months.
Or, in this case, hopefully six weeks.
I calculated that if I put in a good effort, I should be able to knock out the whole thing by the Australian release date. I don't usually average 100 pages per week on any book I'm reading, but it's certainly within my capabilities, even as a slow reader.
Making it a bit extra ambitious, though, was the fact that Jodorowsky says in the film that you don't really understand what's going on in Dune for its first 100 pages. I took that as a challenge rather than a warning, even though I've been known to get beaten by books I could not make sufficient sense of. ("Beaten" does not mean I stopped, except in the case of David Foster Wallace's behemoth Infinite Jest. It just means that the book ended up consuming half my year.)
Fortunately, Dune doesn't make sense in accessible ways. It throws out a lot of terminology without explaining what it means, but the actual language is straightforward and the main characters are introduced in such a way to make it easy to keep track of them. In fact, I felt momentum rather than hesitation at the start of the book, knowing that what I didn't know would make sense as the book went along, or that the parts that didn't make sense might end up more like flavor notes I couldn't really appreciate than narrative essentials to understanding the story.
But then another event came along that I could have sort of anticipated, though there was every chance that it wouldn't occur before December 2nd:
We bought a house.
This is a big topic and it certainly bears more discussion at another time. I don't mean to just drop it in your lap and leave it there. But let's just say the whole thing is freaking me out enough that I haven't even posted about it on Facebook yet, even though it occurred eight days ago. I certainly don't feel ready to delve into it right now. I'll just say that a house hunt that was most likely to stretch into next year ended abruptly when we were the winning bidders at the first ever auction we attended. I think it still hasn't totally sunk in for me.
The thing that's important for the current discussion is that this will add a lot more complication to my schedule before December 2nd. Which suddenly looks like a far less attainable deadline for finishing the book, especially since I currently find myself only on page 185.
The next question is whether it even matters if I finish the book before then. And there's a lot of reasons it might not.
For one, I already saw the Lynch version from 1984. I don't remember more than a few hilarious details ("remember the tooth!"), but I've been exposed to this entire story and everything that's happened in it once already. Still, I probably wouldn't be reading the book right now if I had seen it recently and it were fresh in my memory.
What I have seen recently, though, is Jodorowsky's Dune, in which Jodorowsky blithely reveals the fate of one of the movie's main characters. So I already knew that before I made the decision to purchase the book.
The other reason it may not matter if I finish the book is something I just found out yesterday, after I began drafting this post:
Denis Villeneuve's Dune is not the same as either David Lynch's Dune or Alejandro Jodorowsky's Dune would have been, in that it is only half the story.
I'm glad I happened to be discussing the book in a Facebook chat with a friend yesterday, which led me to the discovery that he had also read the book in the lead-up to watching the movie, and that the movie only covers about the novel's first 300 pages. It's Dune Part I, something the rest of you surely already know, but was news to me.
This brought with it a huge sigh of relief. It'll be easy for me to read another hundred-plus pages in the next three weeks, even with my busier schedule. No problem there.
Now the only problem is trying to read the book with my own ideas of what various characters look like, without being totally poisoned by the cast of Villeneuve's movie.
Since I don't remember very much of Lynch's version, the only thing I could say for sure was that Kyle MacLachlan played Paul Atreidis, the protagonist. I have a suspicion Sting played Baron Harkonnen but I'm not going to look it up to confirm it.
Not that it matters in those cases, because neither of those two actors are competing for my mental images of Paul and Harkonnen. I know Timothee Chalamet plays Paul in this version, as he has been front and center for the advertising I've already consumed (though I have turned my eyes away so as not to see any of the film's trailers). By necessity he is my Paul as I read this. Then I happened to google Baron Harkonnen to see how he had been depicted in illustrations, failing to realize that of course the actor cast to play him in this version, personal favorite Dave Batista, would also be revealed in that search. So Batista is my Harkonnen.
But then a few others I uncovered by accident, specifically, Jason Momoa as Duncan Idaho. Only just now, as I was selecting a poster for this post, did I note Rebecca Ferguson on the poster and realize that she's the perfect casting for the Bene Gesserit, the Lady Jessica. Perhaps only because of her first name, I had been picturing Jessica as Jessica Chastain, and hope I can continue to do that. (And I discarded that poster and went for the one of just Chalamet so as not to worsen this unconscious matching of names to faces.)
There are other actors that I know are in this film, such as Oscar Isaac, but I don't know what role he plays so I can maintain some additional ignorance on that front. (Oops, just blew that. In the interest of fact-checking to make sure Isaac was, in fact, in the movie, I googled "Is Oscar Isaac in Dune?" in the hope that I would get a simple confirmation. Instead it showed me what character he plays. D'oh.)
It may not really matter if you can maintain your own mental image of a character in a book. We read countless books while already knowing who appeared in the most prominent film adaptations of that book. It's a hazard built in to being a person who's aware of popular culture and cannot possibly read all literature before it gets made into a movie.
Besides, my faculties are failing me a bit on this one anyway. For some reason when each new adviser to Leto Atreidis gets introduced in the book, I mentally cast him as looking like Timothy Spall. Timothy Spall is not in Villeneuve's movie so I have no idea where this came from.
One thing that's for certain is that reading Dune before the movie was not an idea that was unique to me. Not only was there the friend who gave me the approximate amount of the novel that appears in this movie, but another friend had previously told me he'd chosen to read the book in the lead-up as well. He's actually an Australian who could not wait for December 2nd and has found a place to watch it illegally online.
Me personally, I'll be waiting. I'm not concerned about the plot or even really the casting being ruined, but I am concerned about the grandeur being ruined by watching it on a TV screen, as this guy and countless HBO Max subscribers around the world have chosen to do. Because when it all comes down to it, movies like Dune may live and die by the spectacle they put up on the screen, not whether they get every detail right from a book that has notoriously been considered unfilmable over the years.
In a few weeks, I'll be able to add my own opinion to the online chorus.
