Book Review: Night Watch

Thousands of years ago, the forces of the Dark and the Light came to an uneasy truce, hoping to bring some sort of peace to their eternal battle with one another. To maintain this peace, both sides set up watches -- agents of "Others" with supernatural abilities -- to oversee each side. The forces of the Dark, known as the Day Watch, kept tabs on the activities of the forces of Light, while the forces of Light did the same in return, becoming known as the Night Watch. Each watch made sure that the other side didn't use magic out of turn or had the proper licenses for vampires to hunt or other such things.

But one night in modern Moscow, while Night Watch Agent Anton Gorodetsky was following a young boy presumed to be under the spell of an illegal vampire hunt, he stumbled across a humble young woman with a strange black vortex swirling over her head -- a sign of being cursed. His attempt to clandestinely rid her of the curse amounted to almost nothing and left him with few weapons when he finally encountered the rogue vampires, inadvertently killing one of them and setting in motion a chain of events that could possibly bring about the end of the world.

Sergei Lukyanenko's first book of the Night Watch series takes the dark fantasy world of the forces of Light and Dark where wizards, sorcerers, vampires and shapeshifters walk along the streets with regular humans -- albeit either in disguise or on a parallel dimension called the Twilight -- and mixes it with a good thriller where Anton tries to figure out the hidden agenda in which his boss has unwittingly "volunteered" him. Lukyanenko creates some great characters, from Olga, a sorceress sentenced to live the rest of her days as an owl as punishment for something in her past that involved Anton's boss, to Boris Ignatievich, Anton's boss who wields powers beyond most Others' comprehension and cleverly coaxes events to turn out just the way he wants them. And those two are agents of the Night Watch. The members of the Day Watch are just as ingenious, such as Zabulon who first appears as a seemingly frail older dark wizard, hiding his need for revenge against Anton. Most impressive, though, is Anton Gorodetsky who struggles to find some fragment of his former humanity hidden beneath his recently released powers. He seems to do things on the fly, but deep down, he's one of the smartest Agents, and through his actions and thoughts, the reader slowly realizes -- just as Anton does -- what's truly at stake.

The book itself seems to be a combination of three novellas, presented chronologically and focusing on a specific aspect of Anton's struggles without having to deal with the mundane passage of time. When story one ends, story two doesn't pick up the thread immediately. Some time has passed, characters are more familiar with each other, but the residue of that first story still lingers and affects what happens. For me, this allows Lukyanenko to move the story along without bogging the reader down with trivialities.

Night Watch delivers all the dark fantasy punches while at the same time telling a fine story of a man struggling to assimilate his new world with his former one. Lovers of fantasy will definitely enjoy this one, and may even want to check out the two movies based upon this series -- Night Watch and Day Watch.

Image from Cover Browser.