Monday, March 26, 2007

Night Watch

I just picked up Sergei Lukyanenko's new fantasy novel Day Watch and though my soul is too consumed with work to be able to read it I thought I'd share some thoughts about the first book in the same series, Night Watch.

The basic premise is that there exists a race of "others". These others are indistinguishable from human beings but possess great powers which become awakened at certain points in people's lives. Once an other emerges it has a short period of time to choose a side, Light or Dark, which will determine their place for the rest of their supernaturally long lives.

The two sides are, obviously, opposed - but there is a wrinkle. In ancient times the forces of Light and Dark met on the Battlefield with the intention of ending their struggle. However, they were too evenly matched and instead they signed the Great Truce which prevented either side from taking action against the other. To enforce this they created the Watches: the Night Watch - manned by Light Ones - watches over the Dark while the Day watch - manned by Dark Ones - watches over the Light. The two watches prevent any action which might tip the balance in one way or the other and strictly regulate and license vampires, witches, and other creatures.

The first things that needs to be realized about the Night Watch series is that they are written by a Russian author and take place in post-Cold War Russia. The watches, the focus of both novels, are simply bureaucrats. Bureaucrats with sweet superpowers, but bureaucrats nonetheless. The characters are restricted from doing anything by the rules they seek to enforce. They must operate along loopholes and struggle to get anything done. Stripped down of its fantasy trappings the novels are simply about people struggling to accomplish anything in a restrictive system that they themselves keep together.

It can really be read as a group of people in a mundane office. The main character, Anton, is relatively new and is still learning the ropes and is not all that valuable to the organization and has minimal, at best, skills. He is simply trying to prove himself to his co-workers. This is compound when he begins a relationship the new worker he helps bring in. She begins to quickly out perform him, clearly has a better innate skill set, and is destined to be promoted to levels he will never reach. All the while he is trying to do his job but must step carefully. Add some superpowers, shape shifters, sorcerors, and fight scenes and that is essentially the book.

The work suffers from some narrative and stylistic excess, taking its own epicness way too seriously, and seems to be trying to hard to be Western which causes some parts to be forced and may be better served embracing its setting rather than try to fit some model it clearly doesn't (the main character uses a Mini-Disc player for Christ sake - a product with a technological lifespan of about 20 seconds). However, it is overall enjoyable and I simply thought it was a great portrait of the struggles within a bureaucracy. Furthermore, while other similar works (ie Brazil) focus on how such a system eats away at a persons soul causing them to break free any way they can Night Watch features characters which truly believe that what they are doing is right and must be done and are willing to fight through the red tape.

Which brings us back to Russia. The country is notoriously embroiled in regulations and it is unable to get anything done without either bribes or endless patience. My parents faced this system when adopting my sister Sasha. Lukyanenko's novel comes from a lifetime of those experiences under both the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation. It is not a hard stretch to see Night Watch as his picture of the democratization of Russia. In the book, threats of vast conflict and destruction come to naught, but the seeds are sown for an inevitable battle at some point over his two sequels. It will be interesting to see where Lukyanenko takes it and how he expands this allegory, I simply wish I could read how he might incorporate the actions of Mr. Putin.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home