I'm more than halfway through the book and I'm enjoying it a lot. It's very much a "sequel" to Paul of Dune as it has scenes of the flashback story arc with Paul's friendship with Bronso of Ix being explored but I'm enjoying it mainly as a really great companion piece to Children of Dune. The book is mainly about Lady Jessica and Alia's fraught mother/daughter relationship in the aftermath of Paul's abandoning of the throne. There's a ton of cheeky lines in the book like when Paul as a young child says something to the effect of, "What kind of evil person would commit genocide?" or when Duncan Idaho when searching for Paul goes, "This is so much information to parse; I wish I was a Mentat" that make me go 'Oh haha Brian/KJA very funny so clever'. Harmlessly cringy dialogue at worse, heavy handed at best.
But, The Winds of Dune shines in the quiet self-reflective chapters centered on Lady Jessica. Jessica is very critical of Alia as regent because she is extraordinarily cruel and autocratic as ruler, even compared to Paul, but throughout the book Jessica becomes aware that she was NOT a good mother to Alia and criticizes her for things she admittedly gave Paul a pass for, like killing 61 billion people in the Jihad. Lady Jessica admits to herself that she always preferred Paul over Alia and I really start to feel bad for Alia because she never got the same support Paul received. This is also shown in the context of Jessica's Bene Gesserit conditioning because she blames her inability to be emotionally vulnerable with her friends and family or even shed tears for Paul on the Bene Gesserit for cauterizing her mind and heart against feeling emotion. This book has made me more resentful of the Bene Gesserit than any other book in the Dune series. In the flashback arc we see a Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother effectively torture Lady Jessica's friend, another BG concubine of Duke Leto's best friend Rhombur of Ix, for simply refusing to sire more children for their breeding program because she, like Jessica, has fallen deeply in love with her husband and didn't want to leave them. But the BG always get what they want even if it means destroying an innocent family that suffers a loss comparable to the fall of House Atreides in Dune. The Bene Gesserit claim to exalt humanity but so often what they do perverts and warps humanity to the absolute limit darkly parallel to the Bene Tleilax. And Alia, as a pre-born Reverend Mother, has inherited the accumulated generational toxicity of their cult concentrated into one individual and she suffers for it even when she thinks she's exuding strength. WoD reveals how DEEPLY insecure Alia is. She feels inferior to Paul, she feels inferior to her mother, and the book subtly implies she feels inferior to IRULAN. Alia has a private diary in this book and it's revealed she is purposefully mimicking Irulan's speech/writing patterns. The same way Alia picks up the bad habits of the ghosts haunting her Other Memory in CoD she is also clutching onto the perceived strengths and traits of the people around her while not being as close to them as she'd like.
Alia is also fundamentally different from Paul and while I entirely believe she loved Paul more deeply than any other character besides possibly Chani WoD reveals that Alia is succumbing to the same selfish sense of ambition that afflicted Korba; she wants her own myth to rival or even surpass her brother's. She's not motivated by the Golden Path. She's motivated by her Atreides pride and her Harkonnen proclivity to exploit, dominate, and conquer. And Lady Jessica sees it and is failing to save her daughter just as she failed to save her son. This book REALLY puts the scene in the finale of CoD into context where Lady Jessica watches frozen and unemotional as Paul get violently murdered in the street by his own priesthood and a few minutes later watches Alia kill herself. Lady Jessica has been wrestling with her BG conditioning for years and its erected walls in her psyche she tragically never managed to break down in time to fully enjoy having a family. It's really heartbreaking.
The most heart breaking scene in this book though is the one I just read where Gurney has to put down his gaze hounds on Caladan after they contract the Bloodfire virus. At first one only dog is sick but Gurney delays finding a vetinariarion which leads to 5 of the 6 sick dogs getting sick and there is no cure. Reading passages of Gurney sobbing, shaking, and unable to even hold a gun to shoot his dogs was fucking agonizing. At the end of the chapter she just slumps in the kennel and pets his last surviving hound and then she whines and looks up at him and her eyes are bloodshot, just like the other infected dogs. I might be reading too deeply into it but I honestly believe this chapter is supposed to be a metaphor for The Golden Path. As Gurney is stroking his last dog he ruefully curses himself for not making better choices, not protecting his other dogs from being infected, and doing the right thing and swiftly and dispassionetly killing the very first dog to save the rest of the pack. And his indecision, his slowness, his being frozen in heartbreak is what led to the horror taking the lives of ALL his dogs. This is exactly the situation Paul has been in since the very first Dune novel. The widespread cruelty and violence of Muad'Dib's Jihad is discussed frequently in this book by people, including Jessica, who don't see "the big picture" Paul spoke about. They don't see or understand that he's allowing the Jihad to destroy cultures, wipe out religions, and sterilize whole entire worlds in order to protect the human race against the ultimate catastrophe of complete extinction. If that's really what Brian Herbert was doing in that chapter then bravo man because it fucking worked for me. The same way Gurney buckled under the heartbreak of losing his gaze hounds is how Paul buckled under the massive heartbreak of losing Chani in Dune Messiah. They both felt trapped and alone.
I still have about 100 pages to go but at this pace I feel comfortable giving The Winds of Dune a worthy 9.5/10. I like it more than Paul of Dune and it retroactively makes Children of Dune even better with the added depth to Lady Jessica and Alia's rivalry. I can't believe I'm saying this but after WoD I actually want to read the third book in this "Heroes of Dune" trilogy Princess of Dune. If Brian Herbert and KJA can keep giving me scenes infused with real human emotion connected to the larger arcs and themes of the main Dune books then I will be locked in.
