Dune

Poor performance of an exceptional book

Any number of reviews will tell you the importance of Dune, the depth and detail that Frank Herbert has taken to craft a thrilling story, amazing characters and a universe that in 2015 is still unique.

This review however, sets to highlight that this reading of Dune is exceptionally bad. The book is read mostly by a single person (altering his voice for different characters, if only slightly) but bizarrely will have characters such as Jessica and Paul be taken over by other narrators seemingly at random parts of the story with seemingly no consistency on who is 'playing'. More confusingly a narrator for one key character, such as Leto Atreides will return later with exactly the same voice (that is to say, not altering it at all) to play a different character.

This performance is disruptive and simply not good. Either have it read by a single narrator or have some consistency with who is reading each character. The most egregious case of this was halfway through a chapter in which two key characters were talking, a small break takes place, and it returns with new narrators for these characters. Why?

The story isn't ruined however. The performers are true to the words of the book and it will not inhibit your ability to get the genuine experience but at times it is jarring and confusing.

it's not unabridged

wow I feel like an idiot. I thought that it was an unabridged reading. I wish there was a full copy of this book that I could listen to because I love the story.

Please put me out of my misery.

Dune is a remarkable epic that sits at the epicenter of the genre. As an audiobook however...this is a shambles. Its as if the budget was expended on the atmospheric sounds effects and background music and with the funds running low the studio just randomly selected bits for the voice actors while the rest was read by the narrator. Not only is it confusing....its at times hilarious. In single scenes you can have three different voices for one character ( remembering Herbert's love of the third person or thoughts of his characters)...hilariously these innermost thoughts can be a totally different actor, voice....god even accent. there are times the primary narrator just seems to forget what voice he uses for a character....you are absolutely lost. watch out for his attempt at Chani when she first appears... How can I liken this experience? Have you ever tried to make an omelette while suffering with a hangover...... with each egg you crack, shell ends up in the bowl...no matter how much you try it just gets worse with the end result being a complete and total yoke ( egg humour)...I digress.... back to analogy... so finally after cooking the omelette you sit down ready to tuck in before throwing up last night's curry with a good helping of vodka flavoured bile. That's the feeling I had as the book ended.

Pretty Epic

What made the experience of listening to Dune the most enjoyable?

Voice was very easy to listen to and the occasional accompanying music was a good touch.

What did you like best about this story?

The voice actors - although they tend to change occasionally which can be confusing.

Have you listened to any of the narrators’s other performances? How does this one compare?

Haven't listened to others

Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?

The final two chapters are very exciting.

Any additional comments?

The voice actors change which makes the book a little confusing and the language of Dune can be hard to follow. Go with the flow and you'll enjoy it.

Exceptional Story, Jarring Performance

The story is excellent, read the book when I was a teenager, seen the movie and could hardly stop listening to this audio book decades later.

The performance was very good in parts but often jarring as voice actors were not consistent with characters. That is the same character would have more than once accent or voice actor which broke immersion in the story.

Great book, inconsistent narration

The book itself is great, a classic. The narration is a bit disappointing. They have voice actors for the major characters, but in half the book they are absent and all the characters are instead voiced by the narrator.

Inconsistent voices

Well read and pleasant voices. However there are inconsistent changes in voice actors which lead to confusion at the very least. Only become a problem since the voices were so good you started to miss them.

An inspiring epic saga of a story

Frank Herbert's grand story barely feels like science fiction. Prepare to feel overwhelmed by the scope of story telling focusing on people, politics, planetary ecology and power struggles. Ideally it would be great to have the voice actors do every chapter, but what is here also works fine. Kudos to the voice actors and Frank Herbert for this, would strongly recommend.

good but

book contains specific voice acting in certain scenes which is fantastic. However, these are not consistent throughout the book and only in important chapters. This can cause some confusion over which character is speaking.

A genre classic with a better setting than story

Dune is very ambitious, and now that I've finally read it I can see the obvious influence that it's had on lots of subsequent sci-fi and fantasy. Herbert is an excellent world-builder; there's lots of great anthropological detail about the people of Arrakis, and he has a very compelling way of writing about prophetic precognition, which is not only artful but also serves as a convenient workaround for preventing prophet characters from being omniscient and knowing everything that's going to happen in the story. World-building aside, however, I must confess to getting pretty bored with the plot around the mid-point, when Paul is just mucking around in the desert with his Fremen pals. Much like Tolkien, then, I guess Herbert's strengths lay more in "secondary creation" than in plotting. I'm not yet sure if I'll continue with the next entries in the series; I don't know if I want to justify pushing on if I'm going to be bored by those as well. But Dune at least had enough ambition and a sufficiently compelling world to warrant the time I spent there.

Regarding the performance of the audio version, I have to say that it was a truly baffling choice to only utilise a full cast for some portions of the book. I can only assume this was due to budgetary reasons, but this begs the question of why not to simply use a single narrator for the whole thing. The narrator they have is quite good, and could easily have carried the whole thing. The voice cast is quite good too, but the distraction of switching between them doesn't seem at all worth it.