Evening Watch: Watch, E book 1

A Dark Fantasy Classic
If you have seen the movie of this book, you have missed out on a much deeper tale with a high level of intrigue. In fact the movie made assumptions on things that often made it confusing to understand. It also excluded much that is in the book. Do not worry about being confused by the book. Night Watch the novel is a many layered, complex story of the Others. Others have access to the Twlight, a dimension/world that underlays our own. Others can do what normal people would consider ‘magic’. This is not the kind you encounter in normal fantasy novels. . This is a combination of tools and magical skills that you are born with, thus some are innately more powerful than others. The power to do magic actually feeds off the emotions of normal people. The more emotional, the more powerful. Encounter someone in the first bloom of love, and you an Other can siphon off that emotion for the feeding of their own magic energy. Take a little and that love might be less intense, take a lot and that love could turn into despondence or indifference. Further complicating this plot is that there are three groups of Others. Light Others, who try to protect humanity from harm, and not use their abilities for personal gain, Dark Others, who use their powers to satisfy their own inner compass (you cannot say it’s evil, as they make individual choices on what they want to do), and non-affiliated Others, who choose to not join either group, though some bend toward the light, some toward the dark. The Light and Dark Others each have their own versions of a police force. The Light has the NightWatch, the Dark has the DayWatch. Each make sure the other stay within the ‘rules’ of a truce signed long ago. This truce allows certain appeal processes, punishments, etc for acts committed by either side. Magic done without regard to the rules has to be balanced. Thus, if a Light one kills a Dark one outside the rules of engagement, than a Light Other must die to compensate. It’s all wonderfully complex and engaging. The novel takes place in Moscow, which is carefully painted in all it’s dreary glory of post communist dissolution. Do not expect it to be easy to determine who is good and who is evil, those are qualities that are not truly addressed within the differences of Light and Dark. Many Dark Others live normal lives, with non-Other wives and children. The same is true for Light Others. Within the Watch things get more political, with each group not afraid to sacrifice their own people to position some long range goal. Encounters are not always what they seem to be, and you will not always see what is going to happen as you do in so many fantasty novels. There are many twists and turns in this story, making it the type of read that you stay up turning page after page.This is an adult fantasy, well written, and a classic. This is the first book in the set, which is followed by The DayWatch (Book Two), and two more.

Another view of the Others
I don’t read very much science fiction anymore, largely because it has become so either repetitive to earlier sci-fi, or has pretensions to literary excellence as if it was ashamed to be group was sci-fi. Night Watch, the entire series, transcends the areas of sci-fi and urban fantasy to create a world that is full, well filled out in every way, and very much realistic without having to stretch the bounds of every day life very far.Lukyanenko’s writing has a particular fascination for me I must admit. As a grizzled and somewhat nostalgic refugee from the Cold War era, the Night Watch series evokes a really rich picture of post-communist Russia. The brilliance of the author’s writing really comes out in this area as it has very little actually said about the Cold War, about contemporary politics, and about the West – – especially the United States. The characters in this book boast of their sincere patriotism to Russia, even though they have little to no contact with human beings not gifted with their superhuman abilities. More interesting, the characters who have lived for centuries if not millennia, recognizing their serial attachments to nations, kingdoms, or simply geographical regions claim, rather falsely, of their post-national self perceptions. they are Russian through and through.Instead, their self-perceptions are intensely nationalistic which raises the era of the Czars, the CP (Communist Party) and gangster ridden post-Communist Russia’s laughable pretensions to “democracy”as if there was really no difference in the eras. The Others as those with superhuman powers refer to themselves see Russian history as a continuous string of time in which events like the Revolution are simply part of the nation and the people that they accurately see as embattled by the rejection of every other country in the world, but which survives because of the intense patriotism of the Russian people. At the same time their references to the US are amusingly contemptuous, pitying, but they ultimately see as a nation which is easily dismissed for its childish petulance (meaning it’s lack of significant history) and its population’s meaningless and mindless pursuit of wealth and status. Yet the Others, no less than the Russian people, are as hopelessly addicted to Hollywood as anyone else in the world, describing their adventures in a cynical but no less sincerely longing context of American action films. Having returned briefly to Moscow several years ago, the Others well reflect the attitudes of Russians in the capital.As a review, the above is probably utterly useless to those interested in the book for which I apologize. The Night Watch series is excellent to the point of being addictive. I read Night Watch Book 1 and immediately went after the others. Just today I finished the last of the series so far (Book 5). I have read nothing else between book 1 in book 5. I think there can be no greater or more expensive endorsement that. It’s a good idea to read them in order, but this is not an absolute necessity. The author takes the somewhat unique approach of structuring the books as a series of three interrelated novelettes. Subsequent volumes do not necessarily follow their predecessors. The gap between each book may be a few years, and there are references to earlier adventures, but to understand later volumes is in no way dependent on having read the earlier books.All five volumes are excellent. To me, book four was more tightly woven and intense, but each volume is excellent in and of itself. I would strongly recommend this series to anyone interested in fiction that cannot easily be identified with any particular genre. Try it, you’ll like it.

Reviewing this book requires me to exercise an uncomfortable degree of intellectual honestly. Halfway through reading it, I became aware of the author’s reprehensible anti-Ukrainian views and his outspoken endorsement of Russia’s presently ongoing invasion of a sovereign nation. As tempting as it is to punish the author with a negative review, literary integrity guides me (as always) to judge the art and the artist separately, which would be a great deal easier if I hadn’t enjoyed the book as much as I’ve come to loathe the author.All that said, the truth is that Night Watch is a fantastic book. The premise is original (at least insomuch as I’ve never come across anything similar), the story is rich and compelling, and the prose is frequently beautiful and lofty without becoming inaccessible. The whole thing does have a distinctly pragmatically philosophical feel which seems to be a theme among any translated Russian works I’ve read. Indeed, the thoughts and dialogue in Night Watch border on morally nihilistic, which might not be very satisfying for all readers but which I personally found extremely interesting.The protagonist, Anton, is neither a likeable nor an unlikeably character, but rather he is fascinatingly realistic given the supernatural world he navigates. The book masterfully frames the mundane and beaurocratic in a world of destiny and power, and the juxtaposition is always very clever and entertaining.The novel is broken into three “stories” which are self contained episodes, but have threads that tie them together and the events of each one build on events in the previous. It’s all put together very well indeed, and I gobbled it up in a short period of time.Were it not for the author’s views, I would likely grab the next book, Day Watch, but I think that is where my moral compass will have to take a stand and deny myself the pleasure in the interest of not sending more money his way.

I’ve wanted to sample Russian authors for a long time, but I did not want to take the tried and tested route of so many other Bibliophiles before me and engorge on the works of Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dostoyevsky and the usual suspects of Russian literary greats. Thus, my search for something different led me to Night Watch.The story (or collection of stories) follows the life of Anton Gorodetsky, a young magician in the employ of The Night Watch, a paranormal organization which polices and monitors the activities of both the ‘goodies’ and the ‘baddies’. I stoop to using such childish generalization because in the book, the concepts of Good and Evil are anything BUT general . The USP of this book (for me) is the level of complexity that is brought into the inherently opposing views of Good & Bad, Light & Dark, Night Watch & Day Watch.It is ultimately the story of a group of people who although supernatural in their abilities, are stuck in pretty much the same ideological and philosophical rut as the rest of humanity. My only criticism is that the plot-points do tend to get away from you at certain moments, and you’re left with a sense that something’s happened, but you don’t quite know what or how. However, this could also be a quirk of the translation or perhaps the inability of someone who’s unfamiliar with Russian works to fully grasp the plots and characters, so it is a minor criticism.Looking forward to continuing with the rest of the series.