I actually enjoyed this instalment of the Dune saga – and I do mean saga! The story has yet to really come to any kind of point, the characters we started with are long dead – or brought back to life! – and yet there’s still a lot of universe to explore.

Here, we find ourself some three and a half thousand years after the original novel – although those events still cast a very long shadow. Everything and nothing has changed, really.

The story itself explains a lot more about the Bene Gesserit, which was both intriguing and somewhat more sordid than I’d thought.

The last of the original novels, Chapter House Dune, follows almost immediately from this one.

I stuck with Frank through all of the other DUNE books, but Book Five was where he lost me. Maybe he was drinking too much at the time he wrote it. Maybe I was drinking too much when I was reading it. For whatever reason, I recall it dragged; I put it aside, and being the kind of person who won’t start another book until I finished the one I am reading, I didn’t read anything for about five months.

Shame on Frank, for putting me through that.