Night Watch

Night Watch (2006) Sergei Lukyanenko translated by Andrew Bromfield

This is not the first or even second time I’ve re-read this book (series, really).

The book Night Watch is split into three separate story arcs, Destiny, Among His Own Kind, and All for My Own Kind, each building upon the previous.

Anton Gorodetsky works for the Night Watch–the group of Light Others who help maintain the treaty between the Light and the Dark. Others are the creatures of myth and folklore: magicians, shape shifters, vampires, witches, and the Night Watch and the Day Watch make sure the other side keeps to the Treaty.

“We’re not supermen in red and blue cloaks who work alone. We’re just employees. The police of the Twilight world.”

In the first story, Destiny, Anton is ordered to leave his server room and go out into the field. He is suppose to both gain experience as a field operative and find a rogue vampire. What he discovers is a young woman with a black vortex looming over her–a vortex powerful enough to possibly destroy Moscow.

In the second story, Among His Own Kind, a Light Other who has gone undiscovered by the Night Watch is killing Dark Others–deaths that are unsanctioned by either Watch, and go against the Treaty.

In the third story, All for My Own Kind, the entire Night Watch is given a long weekend to escape the heat of Moscow in summer. But instead of relaxing, Anton because more and more worried about his future, and how past Night Watch attempts to improve humanity have all be abysmal failures (creating both the Russian Revolution and WWII) and the idea that the Night Watch wants to take the reins of the future again, cause him to doubt the justice of their cause.

One of the things I love about this series that despite the designation of Light others and Dark others, it’s not simplistic, and Anton (who worked as a computer programmer before he was discovered to be an Other, and then as a network administrator for the Night Watch after becoming an Other) isn’t able to see things in black and white, as much as he wants to.

“The common good and the individual good rarely coincide…”
Sure, I know. It’s true.
But some truths are probably worse than lies.

But of course, despite not being a human, being an other, Anton still has human impulses.

I wanted to do something. I wanted to do something as badly as a genie who’d been let out of his bottle for the first time in a thousand years. Anything at all: Raise up castles, lay waste cities, program in Basic, or embroider in cross-stitch.

But mostly, I love the story, and the characters.

(Note: misericorde. A long narrow knife used to deliver a mercy stroke to a gravely wounded knight. from the Latin misericordia, “mercy”)

I also remain surprised at how well the story has aged. It was originally written in 1998, and technology has changed tremendously since then, but with the exception of flip phones and a mini-disc player instead of an mp3 player, there aren’t really that many things that date the story. Which is nice.

Published by Miramax Books / Hyperion

Rating: 9/10

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