Lukyanenko, Sergei: The Night Watch
The Night Watch
Writer: Sergei Lukyanenko
Genre: Urban/Dark Fantasy
Pages: 455
This book originally caught my eye for two reasons. 1) I was fascinated by the cover. 2) It's written by a Russian author, which to me was a promise to get something I wasn't quite used to when it came to the urban fantasy/dark fantasy genre. But when I finally got the book, it sat on my shelf forever, and I really can't give you a good reason why. It just did. But I finally got the bug to read it last weekend, so read it I did. Yes, it officially took me a week, but considering I didn't read anything at all on the weekdays? It technically only took me four days to read this sucker.
The premise: Anton is an Other (yes, snicker all you want, Lost fans), a member of the human race with supernatural powers who must declare himself on either the Light or Dark Side of magic (yes, snicker all you want, Star Wars fans). Anton is a member of the Night Watch, a group of Light magicians who keep the Dark magicians in line. He's nothing special, he's not even THAT powerful, but he's a pawn in an ever-constant war between Light and Dark, and it's about to take him to a woman whose destiny is inexplicably linked with his--a woman who has the potential to be the greatest sorceress ever known.
Spoilers ahead.
Any time I read something that I know has been translated, I really have to wonder what's missing. Certainly, there's something to be said of the poetry: once translated out of its native language, it's gone or at the very least diminished. But also missing, sometimes, is the actual meaning of the scenes. Often while reading, despite all the mental info-dumping Anton gave us, I really wasn't sure just what was going on, or if I knew what was going on, what it meant. Anton never said directly, and I couldn't figure it out until I saw the result of the climax of each book. Now whether this is a failing of the translation or the author, I'll never know. But I do know that often this book felt like a lot of talk without a lot of substance to back it up. Or, rather, the substance came much later after the talk.
The book's divided into three parts, and each part is technically its own story. Each story features Anton as the narrator, but there's a prologue where we meet someone else, and that someone else is the target of either the Night or Day Watch. The mini-story, novella, centers around the person in the prologue and the conflict that person presents.
This was a bit odd for me. I started the book not realizing this was the format it would take, so when I finished part one, "Destiny," I didn't feel the urge to keep reading. I felt like I'd READ the full story, albeit with a few loose strings. It reminded me of a critique my mentor once gave my own writing where he told me that readers, once finished with a certain scene, might be surprised there's still more pages left. That's exactly how I felt after finishing part one, and in this case, there was quite a FEW pages still left.
But what I didn't really anticipate was how the story is actually, in its own roundabout way, a love story. Anton's life is entangled with Svetlana's: he's destined to love her, and because of that, he keeps her at an arm's length because he feels, well, like they're two horses put in a pasture for breeding (though for the record, that analogy doesn't quite fit, because Anton and Svet aren't MEANT to be breeding, just love each other). And the book is also about Svet's growth and path to becoming a great sorceress. "Destiny" is about the discovery of her. "Among His Own Kind" is solely a test to push her to a high level, while Anton is unknowingly the pawn, and "All for My Own Kind" is the final test, the climax where Svet chooses to follow the path others have laid at her feet or to choose a destiny of a different kind. Really, she's the main character, but it's Anton who tells this story, Anton who is always, always the pawn. It's sad in a way, the way others manipulate him. Not in a sad pathetic way, but sad in a way that Anton is just doing his job and he's getting mixed up in higher magical matters that he would have no place in if not for his destined ties to Svetlana. It's kind of weird, but what redeems it all at the end is the revelation that the boss has acted in order for his OWN true love to achieve HER powers, so that they can be equal again, as there's a great deal of stress in this book that a couple with unequal magical capabilities can never truly be happy. The Night Watch is a love story, but not in a tradition sense, and certainly not in the way the fans of paranormal romance would recognize.
But what about the rest of it? It was really cool to see something like this set in Moscow. The different setting alone added a bit of new life to familiar tropes, and really, for all the shape shifters, vampires, and Dark Magicians, the book is heavy on the philosophy of morality. Maybe it's because I just saw Religulous this weekend, but all the talk about the balance/Treaty between Light and Dark and how Light can create more evil than Dark, so on and so forth really made me think that Lukyanenko's world, his magics, are some kind of parallel to the Christian idea of heaven and hell. Why DOESN'T good/Light simply wipe out evil/Darkness in order to save humanity? That's the question this book is constantly pursuing while exploring the importance of balance and the root evil in all of humanity. While the talk gets heavy and redundant after a while, it does provide a fresh and interesting outlook on the existence of supernatural creatures in a natural world, and I thought it particularly interesting was Lukyanenko's take on communism: how it was a plan created by Light in order to bring humanity to a new level of good, but the sorceress in charge made a mistake and that's why it went bad. Truly, it's fascinating stuff. I just wish that I could've read it in the original Russian, because I might've been a little quicker on the uptake. That, or maybe it would've helped if I had a bit more schooling in Russian history and the like. Whatever the case, great details, but I always felt like the characters were ahead of me in their train of logic.
My Rating
Worth the Cash: I haven't seen the film adaptation, not sure I'm going to, but I'm glad to have read this. It's a little different from the usual urban/dark fantasy fare, and the setting provides a definite freshness to the world-building and magic. But I'm really not sure I'm invested enough in the characters or the world-building to continue reading the rest of four-book cycle. From what I gather, all the books are structured like this, three connecting novellas in one book, and going from story to story--even with the same characters and overall arc, sometimes feels too much like starting over. The Night Watch almost covers TOO much, glossing over some stuff between novellas that I would've personally liked to see fleshed out, but that's me. And while I know this is a movie, I think this book (series) would make fantastic material for a television series. There's definitely entertainment value with some meat on the bones, but again, I'm not sure there's enough for me to pick up the next volume. Maybe when I'm bored? No, that sounds too negative. The rest of the series might call to me one day, and I'll be happy enough to oblige at that time, but until then, I've got too much else to read.
Next up:
Horizons by Mary Rosenblum