The Road to Hell is Paved with Bad Writing
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Author: Sergei Lukayenko
Title: The Night Watch Genre: science fiction There are Others among us; human and yet more than human, possessed of powers only dreamt of by ordinary humans. There are witches and wizards, sorcerers and sorceresses, shape-changers, healers, were-creatures, and (of course) vampires. These Others have arrayed themselves into two forces; a force for Light and a force for Darkness... what mere mortals usually call Good and Evil. Through the millennia the two forces have maintained a delicate balance; a balance that has kept the most evil events from befalling the humans they protect. Since it's a balance, though, perhaps it goes without saying that some of the best things that could happen to humanity have also been prevented. Think about it... Anton works for the Moscow branch of Night Watch - the agency by which Light (the good guys) keeps tabs on Dark (the bad guys), who have their own agency, the Day Watch. Anton's just your average back-office worker, a programmer, in fact, who manages the Night Watch's network and software and their database of all the nasty tricks the Day Watch has attempted to pull off. When he's sent into "the field," however, to find a vampire gone rogue, he accidentally discovers a world-class curse literally hanging over the head of the beautiful Muscovite physician Svetlana. From that moment on, Anton's life is changed; as he is thrust into the midst of a vast plan, a conspiracy set in motion long before he was born. And he has absolutely no idea what his role is to be, much less why he has been chosen to carry it out - those are decisions left to the most powerful sorcerers, ancient Others like his boss Gesar and the head of the Day Watch, Zabulon. All that's left to Anton is to live his life as if he were in control of his destiny, and seek a chink in the plan that will allow him some measure of control. It doesn't help that he has no idea of the plan's purpose - or, for that matter, who the planners are. All he knows is that Svetlana - his beautiful, sweet, sad Svetka - will also play a big part in that plan... Every once in a while, a great new writer takes the literary world by storm. Sergei Lukyanenko, however, is not that writer, nor is The Night Watch a book that will set magical fantasy on its ear. Originally written in Russian in 1998, The Night Watch (translated by Andrew Bromfield) is the first book of a trilogy whose other two installments (The Day Watch and The Twilight Watch) have likewise been translated and are now in print. The opening installment has already been made, according to its cover, into a "major motion picture." If you take my advice, however, you'll steer clear of the trilogy; and on the assumption that you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, the movie as well. The Night Watch forms a sort of triptych; three novellas that form a single arc, spanning several months. In the first novella, "Destiny," Anton makes the acquaintance of Zabulon and Svetlana and learns that he, Svetlana, and a frail young boy named Egor are part of the same destiny. The second novella, "Among His Own Kind," which is set a few months later, finds Anton the unwitting target of a cunning Dark trap... at least as far as he can tell. Novella three, "All for My Own Kind," details Anton's growing awareness of the path upon which he and the other actors were set in the opening chapters; and leads to a climax that can best be described as "not with a bang but a whimper." Perhaps it is Lukyanenko's morose Russian psyche (wait a minute - every Russian I know is jolly! - both of 'em), but The Night Watch is about as depressing a novel as I've read in a long time. It could be the pessimism that permeates Anton's character, too. Or perhaps it's just the fact that the book is truly boring. "Destiny" starts out with a bang; lots of action including vampires who implode (must've been watching "The Charmed Ones") and a twenty-meter tall vortex of pure evil that stalks the heroine. Things go downhill from there - and by the time we're done with the third novella, the action is pounding along at approximately the same intensity as the middle of War and Peace. The more contemplative Anton gets - and he begins to do a lot of navel-gazing somewhere in the second book - the less interesting he becomes (my friend dramastef simply says he's "whiny," about as good a description as any, I guess). Careful consideration of those "action" scenes, however, reveals that Lukyanenko has talent for little other than the soul-searching aspects of his novel. When things are actually happening - battles with the Dark, spy missions, whatever - the text reads like a teenage girl's journal: "and then Drew, like, goes... and I go... and Heather, like, you know, like... and Alexa goes..." Perhaps the language is cleaner, but the flow remains as inane. The plot stays completely linear throughout, told in the first person (except for brief "prologues"), so readers never actually get to see the outside of Anton's head. I mean that literally: it isn't until well into the second novella that we even get a feeling for what Anton looks like, but then, we have little feeling for anycharacter descriptions throughout other than their assorted magical personas. For a novel that is told entirely in the first person, the reader knows remarkably little of what the narrator actually sees... That pretty much includes Moscow itself, for Anton and the action keep returning to the same two building, a "box on stilts" and a "matchbox set on end." Sheesh - Moscow's a pretty big city for all the action to take place in two buildings! As many have noted before me, there's a literary phenomenon sometimes called "the Dune effect," in which each sequel gets progressively worse than the last. The three novellas that make up The Night Watch comprise a Dune effect within a single book; as the first installment is fairly readable but the next two get progressively more leaden. Assuming that the other two installment in the trilogy are also miniature triptychs, by the time one reaches the ninth novella things are going to be pretty darned bad if this trend continues. Me, I'm not planning on reading the fourth, much less the ninth. Vampire novels are all the rage these days (though usually a lot steamier than this chaste little number). Perhaps that - and the (to my mind questionable) literary taste of film director Quentin Tarantino - are what has driven the popularity of Lukyanenko's works in English translation. What is unfortunate is that, buried deep within The Night Watch, Lukyanenko begins to wax philosophical about the nature of Good and Evil. If there is one lesson to be learned from the novel (besides "don't read the rest"), it is that the old saw may well be true: The road to hell is paved with good intentions. But, then, I knew that long before I read 450 pages of bad fantasy. |