Sergei Lukyanenko's Night Watch Reviewed

Russian Dystopian Urban Fantasy Epic With Cold War Themes Evaluated

Jan 13, 2009

A review of Night Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko, a harsh, Cold War inspired dystopian fantasy who's worldwide success has been marked by film adaptations and book sequels.

Sergei Lukyanenko’s sprawling fantasy epic Night Watch takes the everyday world and tares it apart, inserting vampires, witches, spells and dark curses, all which go unseen by the general populous of modern-day Moscow as the mysterious Others use all their arcane powers to keep their existence, and long running feud, a secret.

Night Watch is like Harry Potter on steroids, with a far reaching plot in this first of a dystopian series, that involves Anton Gorodestksy, an agent of the Night Watch team who patrol the streets to keep unknowing Moscow citizens safe from the Night Watch’s dark counterparts, the Day Watch, who falls in love with a seemingly normal female doctor who is under a powerfully destructive curse.

Whilst attempting to save his new lover, Anton uncovers a young man who, at last, reveals himself to be an Other, and who must choose between the ultimately opposed sides of good and evil, the Night Watch and the Day Watch respectively, and who’s choice may be the key to winning that battle once and for all, tying all three characters together in this gritty fantasy by Sergei Lukyanenko that has spawned film adaptations, video game incarnations and a litany of sequels.

A great deal of space in the book is spent on the exploration of the nature of good and evil, and indeed Lukyanenko creates situations within Night Watch that test the extremes of both as Anton and his band of fellow agents attempt to battle the curse that threatens to destroy Moscow itself.

In fact, during the three sections of the novel, and alongside Anton’s rise from a low level employee to the world's last hope, Sergei Lukyanenko takes time to torture his main character and give him every opportunity for a crisis of faith, and with echoes of the Cold War woven in to the feud, there is a certain authenticity to Lukyanenko’s plot.

However, the writer’s trickery in creating off-stage events for Night Watch that make the forefront plot no more than a side-bar, can be infuriating at times and the constant sense that, no matter how powerful the lead characters become there is always something more, something stronger to undervalue them, becomes somewhat wearing by the end of the three sections after repeated and continual use.

As inventive and imaginative as Lukyanenko’s Night Watch is, it suffers one main problem, and that is the issue of translation. Whilst some scenes are beautifully drawn and instances of true magic between characters such as Anton and his increasingly more powerful lover Svetlana are wonderfully described the dialogue is under-served by poor phrasing and a kind of faux Americanisation that grates against an otherwise authentic story.

There are also some issues with the first person perspective which Lukyanenko sometimes strains to cope with in Night Watch, as it limits his ability to pack every little detail vital to the story's outcome into a short and sometimes aggravatingly fast gambit of scenes.

With that said, the pace of urban fantasy Night Watch is, more often than not, something to enjoy, and whilst Lukyanenko is speculative and at times introverted as he maps out his character's thoughts, it is not long before some new catastrophe or problem pulls Anton out from his reverie and into the line of fire once again.

Overall, Night Watch is a gripping read, and though it does have faults, it also has a freshness to its narrative, with a battle between good and evil that, whilst it is certainly not a new concept, is refreshing in its recast to such a thoughtful and descriptive, Russian-centric arena as this.

(Originally Translated by Andrew Bromfield; Series Name: The Night Watch Tetralogy; Publication date 1998 (original Russian edition) Publisher: Miramax U.S.A, William Heinemann U.K; Print Pages 336 pp; UK Hardback/Paperback: ISBN 0-434-01609-8/ISBN 0-434-01412-5;USA Edition: ISBN 1-4013-5979-5)

The copyright of the article Sergei Lukyanenko's Night Watch Reviewed in Utopian/Dystopian Fiction is owned by Steve Williams. Permission to republish Sergei Lukyanenko's Night Watch Reviewed in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.