Sergei Lukyanenko : The Night Watch (Heinemann 2006)

Like a gust of fresh cold winter’s air on a midsummer’s day Russian author Sergei Lukyanenko steps up and revitalises a favourite fantasy world; presenting an eternal struggle between good and evil in a new and blinding light. With not a damn cape, count or coffin to be seen in a modern vivid urban Russia, replete with echoes of communism and the impact of free trade and the Mafia. Sergei pulls no punches and drags you mercilessly into a world of gritty realism where there is a price to be paid for every thought, word and deed. With no fanfare or velvet build up, the unseen world of Twilight, inhabited by dark ones and light ones or known collectively as “others” is revealed.

This is where Sergei triumphs as a new giant of literature in his vivid descriptions and by laying down a carefully described world of good and evil, light and dark. With a clear vision Sergei has swept away the flights of nonsensical semi-eroticism one almost expects from any book with a vampire in it. In the footsteps of Tolkien and Frank Herbert, Sergei has meticulously created a wholly feasible onion layered society of “others” which as complex as it is, has some simple truths that form a precise and sturdy structure.

With out spilling too many beans about Night Watch and ruining it for you if you haven’t read it yet, one of my own pet peeves when reading reviews. Let me just say this, Sergei has finally given vampires, werewolves, witches and warlocks a truly practical modern world to live in. Gone are the clichés of garlic and sunlight of death etc. Sergei firmly wipes away the cobwebs and makes this age old theme shine once more.

It is a world that scares you because it seems so close to “reality” yet it stands firmly apart, a world where “normal” humans are sheep before a pack of wolves or “dark ones”. But again so close to home as even this slaughter of innocents for food is a process that is watched, reported, recorded, categorised and classified much like any commercial city abattoir. A world where the callousness of organised bureaucracy is akin to extended front line soldiering in it’s effects upon the members of the “light ones” at the Night Watch and their counterparts at the Day Watch.

Sergei makes his dark world of organised mayhem again stand out because the battle between good and evil has matured. It is no longer a primal battle driven only by brute strength and single minded determination to kill or protect. Sergei has given these two forces perhaps their biggest burden ever, an enforced peace. Like a thousand year old Berlin wall, so the Night Watch and Day Watch stand divided, but just like the ambiguousness of the Cold War era, a peace enforced means just be more careful and deceptive. This peace is also compromises and sees the innocent die. While the “light ones” more than capable of protecting them are prevented by a bureaucratic spreadsheet of balancing statistics and compromises to keep the peace. Yet the system makes perfect sense, a logical outcome of the thousands of years of outright war between the two sides.

Sergei presents this brave ancient world primarily through the eyes of his protagonist Anton a medium level peon in the Night Watch organisation to begin with. With his fresh eyes newly forced away from the computer screen of an IT system analyst, and into the cold wall front lines. From his narrow and naïve black and white perspective we wade into ever increasing shades of grey the closer he gets to the wall between good and evil. Which like an eternally decreasing golden rectangle spirals smaller and smaller, but never without another subdivision possible, and so that final dividing line between is never found. In a game of constant life and death Anton though somewhat calloused by passing events never looses his essential humanitarian core. It is this core that forces a towering but reluctant hero to emerge when the occasion calls for a selfless act driven by more than just the ancient game between light and dark. Again it is Sergei’s deep realism of character and world that keeps you close and intimately involved in Anton’s gradual change that echoes that of the reader discovering with him the truth’s of Sergei’s complex yet wholly believable eternal struggle.

The Night Watch marks a new era in fantasy, one in which we are not as readers continually fobbed off into prescribed tolkienesque fantasy landscapes. Where authors must conceive and create new fresh portrayals backed by in-depth well thought out worlds and deep believable characters, within one book. Yes there are three more books in the Night Watch series, but Sergei just doesn’t have that; let’s write one long verbose prescribed novel and chop it up into 10 books for more money, feeling to his works. I believe there is a new giant amongst us, and his name is Sergei Lukyanenko.