The religious Father Michael will piss you off with his lack of feeling for the raped teenagers he cares mostly for their sinful souls and their entry into heaven, while I was grossed out that the army protected the old jerk raping them. When we do hear about deceased wives, it's always about how much they miss their knitting or some such old-fashioned domestic crap.
Most of the book follows a bunch of angry men who, despite all they claim to the contrary, don't even care about women, never mind their women. Yes, we hear about the rapes of the surviving pockets of women, the sexual abuse of about 30 teens by one rich pedophiliac goat, and how certain countries at the end lend, say, one thousand of their "breeding women" to one another (America was not so generous with its cattle female stock). This story about the near extinction of women has a few women, yet only two women in the story manage to get in with their perspectives on how the plague affects them. I stuck with it because I try to complete most books and I wanted to see if it got better. The story was long and tedious, like what I would expect a sci-fi fan in a writing class to try and pass off as epic merely because they scribbled over a thousand pages. The only character that was somewhat likeable and had a more developed personality died soon after her introduction the other characters were wholly unlikeable. If you like big ideas and can deal with a seriously flawed book, read it. Then, as one of his final ways to wrap up the story, Herbert resorts to the "putting the villian on trial - literally" cliche. In a world where there are tens of thousands of men for every woman, what place does homosexuality take in this new order? Do women become more revered and have more power? Or do they become slaves? And some huge, obvious questions are left basically untouched. Some characters and conversations are so stilted as to literally make you laugh out loud (or cringe, depending on your temper). It is frustrating because the execution and characterization leave much to be desired.
He also manages to show how Ireland is so immersed in its own distant past, and how these plague times will similarly be mythologized, and how that might be both good and bad. It delves even deeper than a typical end-of-the-world story, though, by setting the villian and a few other characters on a long, quiet walk through what's left of Ireland, showing how the plague has warped life. This novel has another great idea, that of a man-made pandemic.
Herbert is great at big ideas and thoroughly thinking them through, showing how each and every aspect of life and society might be impacted (see Dune).
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