Review: Night Watch

Night Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko is a fun read, fast paced and written in a style that makes you want to keep reading. I liked it quite a lot. In the world of this story, there is an enternal battle occuring between the forces of Light and Darkness. However, some time before the story opened, the two sides realized that their struggle would never end, and so drew up a treaty between them. This treaty created a balance between the two sides, with two police forces to ensure the balance is maintained. The Night Watch are Light Others who police the darkness, while the Day Watch are Dark Others who police the light. To perform acts of either light or darkness requires licenses from the opposing side, so vampires for instance require licenses from the Night Watch to hunt humans.

THe hero of Night Watch is Anton Gorodetsky, a mid-level Night Watch member who as the novel is opening is being transferred from analysis to field work. In the first story in the book (the novel is made up of three interconnected novellas), Anton has been given the assignment to track down and detain two vampires that have been killing without a license. While traveling through the subway system he encounters a woman with a black vortex over her head, meaning that someone has cursed her. What is surprising is that her black vortex is much bigger than it should be, and when her curse kills her, it could quite possibly kill everyone in Moscow as well. However, Anton cannot do anything about it, and continues to pursue the vampires, stopping them from killing a boy named Egor and killing one of them. The rest of the novella deals with hunting down the other vampire, protecting Egor (who is an Other who has not yet picked a side) and dealing with Svetlana, the woman with the curse over her head.

The second section deals with a Light Other who has not been initiated into the Light named Maxim. Despite knowing nothing about either the Light or the Darkness, he has discovered his own powers and uses them to kill low level Dark Ones he encounters. Unfortunately this causes trouble for the Night Watch and more specifically for Anton, as the Day Watch seems to be attempting to frame him for the killings. This section seems to undercut reader's assumptions about the struggle between the Light and the Darkness, for instance by demonstrating why killing random Dark Ones can cause more evil than good.

The third section deals with a dangerous gambit by the Night Watch to turn humanity towards the Light. However, Anton opposes it, reflecting back on other attempts to turn humanity towards good that were corrupted by the Dark Ones into great forces for evil-including communism and Nazism. The story ends on an ambiguous note.

I quite liked the characters in the book, particularly the Night Watch. The weird rivalry between Semyon and Ilya, Anton's no-nonsense partner Olga (who spends quite a lot of the first section as an owl), Anton's boss Gesar who has plans within plans, and Anton himself, who is eternally attempting to figure out what's going on. They seem like an odd sort of family, connected together by their love for each other. The Dark Ones are also interesting, although we only really get to meet three in this book, the Day Watch witch Alisa, the head of the Day Watch Zabulon, and Anton's neighbor Kostya, who's a vampire. With Kostya we are introduced to one of the themes of the novel: that there is not that much inherent difference between the Light Ones and the Dark Ones. The main difference is that the Dark Ones are mainly concerned with themselves, while the Light Ones are concerned with others. This however leads to troubling issues, as for instance the plots of the Light can easily sacrifice pawns in order to save greater numbers of people.

The plots of the three stories in Night Watch are a little confusing, particularly the second and third parts. In the second part the reader is led to believe one thing, but at the end there is a twist which reveals that in fact something else has been going on. The problem is that this twist is revealed in the very last line of the second section, and in the third section Lukyanenko neglects to provide much in the way of any more information to make that twist make sense. The ending to the third section is a little better, but we are still shown acts without properly being told what they mean. One side wins at the end of the third section, but I don't know how or why. It also bothered me a bit that it seems that the Light and the Darkness are rather unfairly balanced: it seems that the Darkness is rather heavily favored. Apparently humanity tends more towards the Darkness, and the Dark Ones throughly abuse this. Light Ones are also handicapped by the fact that to use their power risks it being corrupted to serve the darkness: killing a Dark One can lead to anguish that overwhelms any good from keeping them from doing evil, and to gather power to do something good Light Ones apparently have to take happiness from humanity. This is a rather dark way of looking at the world, and also makes it harder to understand why Light and Darkness are at a stalemate if Light is inhibited and Darkness is not. Perhaps when I read the sequel, Dark Watch, it will make more sense.

All in all this was a good and fun book, and I recommend reading it. I'm definitely going to read the next books in the series as soon as I can.