Night Watch: The Watch 1 by Sergei Lukyanenko

From The Week of November 12, 2012 Until we better understand the laws of our universe, destiny will remain a tempting enigma. For if destiny exists as a force in our world, then we are relieved of responsibility for the choices we make. After all, in such a world, the arcs of our lives are predetermined, their outcomes set. And if we are incapable of altering our individual fates, we might as well sit back and enjoy the ride. Of course, this is a considerably easier position to accept if the outcome in question is positive. What if our destiny is to be hit by a bus, to be betrayed by our most dear, to be kept from the stage of world events? What if our destiny is to never connect with the one we love most? Then destiny's blessings become shackles, the cruel impositions of a heartless god. The certainty in which we took comfort becomes a curse we'd do anything to avoid. Mr. Lukyanenko expands in his interesting but troubled work.

In present-day Moscow, life is not all that it seems. Beneath the radar of the millions of Moscovits living and working, hoping and yearning, a cold war is being waged between two eternal foes, light and dark, good and grim. It is a war with civilized rules, a war with codes of conduct. It is even a war with a declared truce, but this does not make it any less of a conflict, schemes and games, traps and plots designed to ensnare the unwary.

Occasionally, these games spill out into the wider world, affecting the humans who dominate Earth. However, for the most part, they are confined to an underworld populated by the Others, a collection of mages and shapeshifters, witches and demons, who have existed in parallel with humanity for as long as anyone can remember. For centuries, they senselessly clashed, seeking advantage for the side they'd sworn to advance, until the great truce, brokered by both sides, imposed upon all of their members restrictive rules that no one liked but most adhered to. In order to enforce those rules, three powerful bodies were created: the Day Watch, tasked with monitoring the followers of the light; the Night Watch, sworn to police the denizens of darkness; and the Inquisition, a neutral body designed to adjudicate conflicts between the two.

Anton Gorodetsky belongs to the Night Watch. A magician of unremarkable powers, he is caught up in greater events when a supremely gifted sorceress for the light unexpectedly comes into her powers. In love with the young woman, anton attempts to protect her from the machinations of their broader community, but the forces arrayed against him hunger to use her powers for their own games, their own gain, and anton is ill-equipped to stop them. This is the world he knows. This is the world bubbling beneath the surface of human reality. These are the happenings in twilight.

From political machinations to eternal powerplays, from the pettiness of cruelty to the fickleness of joy, Night Watch is an engaging rumination on power, both its uses and its abuses. Casting its protagonists as pawns in a much grander game played by masters of light and shadow, Mr. Lukyanenko re-imagines the daily conflicts in the human world, hedonism versus noble self-restraint, authoritarianism versus individualism, deploying Gorodetsky and his friends as metaphors for each of these forces. In this, he makes a worthy and worthwhile attempt at highlighting the strengths and the pitfalls of each of these positions without biasing the reader in any particular direction. Such a nuanced approach is welcome in its rarity.

However, while the novel's broader themes work well, Night Watch's actual plot leaves a lot to be desired. Not only do Mr. Lukyanenko's characters spend considerable time brooding over and bemoaning their fates while waiting for the story to move forward, the work's plot hangs on several tenuous coincidences which, while explained, fall far short of being convincing. Some of this is surely intentional, as the author attempts to pass onto the reader Anton's mounting frustrations and delusions with the world and his work, but this doesn't entirely account for the awkwardness of the story's construction. Moreover, the degree to which the author transfers the responsibility for the consequential conflicts of the 20th century, and the social movements that were energized by them, from humanity to magic-users is less than satisfying. True, this is fiction; what's more, Mr. Lukyanenko's magicians may well be stand-ins for the human powers who run our world from beyond our purview. However, neither explanation helped much to rinse the distastefulness of this conceit from my mouth.

This is a cold novel that, though it pre-dates Jim Butcher's Harry Dresden by two years, nonetheless channels some of the energy present in both that character and his series. However, Night Watch sacrifices the humor and the superficiality of such works to speak to deeper truths about ethics and the good life that, ironically, function better than the actual plot. The author is trying to make broader points about human existence while couching them in tropes and themes a general audience will enjoy and understand, making the work as commendable as it is flawed. (3/5 Stars)