The Sixth Watch

Six, By Her Hex

The Sixth Watch
by Sergei Lukyanenko
Penguin
ISBN: 978-1-78-515030-2

And so, finally, the sixth book of Lukyanenko’s famous Night Watch series is translated into English.

If you are not familiar with the Night Watch series then you may remember the large budget Russian blockbuster movies made last decade... Night Watch (2004) and Day Watch (2006). They were pretty well received films internationally and, personally, I think the second was a little better (at least in terms of being anywhere near the source material as an adaptation) but they were really so far away from the content and atmosphere of the original stories that, when you first start reading these things, you might feel you’ve got the wrong batch of books. They were cool films but the books, which are a million miles away from what director Timur Bekmambetov did with the movies, are so much better and more engaging than their cinematic equivalents.

The books, to date, are The Night Watch, The Day Watch, The Twilight Watch, The Last Watch, The New Watch (reviewed here) and this latest addition to the stories, The Sixth Watch. The stories follow the exploits of a group of light and dark wizards, vampires, witches and so forth who are working behind the scenes of our modern world and keeping the balance between good and evil. They’re mostly told in the first person by the main hero of the stories, Anton Gorodetsky, who starts off when we meet him as a lower grade ‘Other’ and who advances and gains power (and also gains a wife and daughter) as the novels progress. They’re a bit like Adam Hall’s Quiller books in style, with a little more humour as the stories progress and mixed up with the kind of wizardry one might expect from a J. K Rowling novel.

They are fairly gritty in nature, which I suspect might possibly be a trait of Russian literature... but also quite magical and witty. They're also very rewarding and the story arc of each novel doesn’t usually go quite to where you think it’s going to go. There’s usually a revelation or two about regular characters you think you already knew and, quite often, people you care about wind up either dead or forever changed in some way... and this one is certainly no different in that respect.

This latest tome in the series follows the pattern set about by the earlier novels to some degree, in that it’s split into three parts with various chapters comprising each section. Usually, though, each section tells a different short story... sometimes with shifting viewpoints but with the majority of the novels narrated first person by, as I said earlier, Anton Gorodetsky. Then, when you get to the end of the last part, it usually reveals itself as a binding part of an arc which the earlier sections have been leading up to as kind of puzzle pieces of the larger story and a more crucial ‘end game’. In this new one, however, the sections do not take the appearance of stand alone stories at all and I wonder why the writer chose to split this one into parts at all since each section carries on directly after the last one ended.

Indeed, the story which starts off the first chapter makes it clear that the various factions - The Night Watch, The Day Watch, The Inquisition and The Witches - must work together to try and defeat an impending threat which, in the usual high stakes stories by this author, would mean an end to both them and the rest of humanity on the planet. This kickstarts in two ways. Firstly, an unknown vampire is drinking blood from victims who are left alive rather than drained and Anton is given the case, which is kind of beneath him now since he is such a unique other... not to mention his even more powerful wife Svetlana and his completely unprecedented, powerful daughter Nadya. He quickly learns that this is because the initials of the names of the victims bitten in order are spelling out his name and giving him a warning. Is the vampire his enemy, though, or an ally? Meanwhile, all the 'prophetic others' in the world from all the various factions have a simultaneous prophecy about the return of a long forgotten being called ‘The Two In One’ and, as usual, the prophecy is buried in clue filled rhymes which Anton and the others have to try and solve... this one including talk about a Sixth Watch and the end of the world, due in just a few days time. And that’s the basic plot set up.

And it’s wonderfully written although, I was pretty sure I knew how this one was going to turn out. I’d just assumed that, at some point, someone would be smart enough to figure out that as long as the conditions of the prophecies were never met then nobody would have to worry about it reaching its ultimate conclusion and that, I figured, is why nobody in the Watches seems to know anything about The Two In One or The Sixth Watch from their archives. However, I’m pleased to say (in some sense) that I was wrong and the arc concludes quite differently.... with a certain amount of sacrifice which will certainly mean the books, if any more are written in the future, will be a completely different affair... at least from the starting point of any further adventures.

Now I’m not going to say much more about the content of this one except that a few significant characters who I thought I’d never see again make return appearances in this book... including The Tiger, who made so much trouble in The New Watch and who is seen as an ally of his human basis, Anton, here. So when The Tiger is involved, a creature born from the Twilight which is where all the sorcerers and shape-shifters draw their power, the reader know the dangers are very great indeed.

What I will say is the book is carrying on in the globe hopping tradition of the later tomes and it’s not all set in Russia, although the majority certainly is. It’s also a wonderful read, as usual and, while the end of this volume seems like it’s a dead end for the series... and may even be intended as such... I’m pretty sure that Sergei Lukyanenko could certainly whip up another one where a certain character’s fate is either reversed or improved upon should he so desire (so I’ve not given up on another cracking Night Watch adventure to come just yet, although I recently found out this one is being marketed as "the final" Night Watch book... we shall see).

And I don’t have too much else to say about The Sixth Watch other than that the first person style makes these books easy to slip into and the cynicism of the central character and his attitude to certain aspects of the fantastic elements which make up these stories ensure that the ideas are easy to access and, once in, you will probably be as agog as I was. To say that these books are page turners is a bit of an understatement, for sure. So for all fans of the series... don’t hesitate as it’s another great novel and it might, just might, be the concluding volume in the series. If you’ve never read one of these before... well, the characters do tend to progress and grow from novel to novel so you’d be much better off starting from scratch with The Night Watch and reading them in order. These are great books, though and fans of fantasy fiction shouldn’t let these go unread. I just wish somebody would do a set of TV miniseries’ and adapt them properly... they certainly deserve it.

The New Watch

Watch New Pussycat

The New Watch 
by Sergei Lukyanenko
William Heinemann Publishing
ISBN: 978-0434022311

Back in 2004, director Timur Bekmambetov made a movie called Night Watch which caused a bit of a splash at the time, seeing as it was a big budget Russian fantasy movie which was kind of beating Hollywood at it’s own game. It was, to be fair, quite an impressive movie but a little flimsy in story line in places. I found the sequel that the same director made, which was released a couple of years later, called Day Watch, to be a lot better but some of it still didn’t really hang together in the way I would have liked... when I read the novels on which these two movies were allegedly based, I found out why. There’s certainly a little more of the original works, although by no means all, showing through in the sequel movie.

When I finally got around to reading these stories from about 2006 onwards, I finally realised that the movie adaptations were not just competing with Hollywood in the “budget spectacular” stakes. They were also very much competing in the “how a major budget motion picture can completely screw up the process of adaptation and change it so much that the storyline becomes almost completely unrecognisable” stakes too. Which is a shame, actually, because the casting of the main characters was pretty good. However, Bekmambetov and his team seem to have grafted their own story onto the whole thing, to do with the lead protagonist Anton Gorodetsky’s son and the way it will effect the future of the world. To give you some idea... Anton Goredetsky doesn’t even have a son in the novels... that whole plot line was an invention for the movie versions.

The other big revelation I had when I read the first four novels... slowly, as they finally got released in English translations year by year... is that the movies pale into insignificance next the sheer brilliance of the source material. The five novels in the series so far are... The Night Watch, The Day Watch, The Twilight Watch, The Last Watch (which I think everyone thought would be the last in the series as it concludes a fair few strands of storyline in the final few chapters) and now the latest in the saga, released a couple of months ago... The New Watch. And I have to say that my fears that this would be a hastily written tag on to the series to make money were thrown out the window as soon as I got involved in the plot.

The Night Watch series of books is a very special series. I’ve not read anything with quite the atmosphere created here in the whole of fantasy or science fiction. They are each divided into three stand alone stories, usually told in first person narrative by the cynical hero of the series, the aforementioned Anton Gorodetsky (but not always, although that character appears in nearly all of the segments in one way or another). By the end of the first book the stories are brought together and reveal themselves to be one, very cohesive arc and the subsequent books conform to this pattern and also, of course, add the previous book’s main arc as part of one continuing arc. The hero is usually manipulated into situations and decision processes which usually end up with him turning out to be a pawn between his boss in the Night Watch (the light other magicians) and the head of the Day Watch (comprising the dark magicians who are more inclined to evil, although the wafer thin line between good and evil is furiously emphasised and discussed the more the series continues).

To my mind, they have the feel of both something magical and child like, like I imagine the Harry Potter books to be, but advanced into an adult state and mixed up with something like Adam Hall’s excellent Quiller series of books in terms of bleak, depressing, no nonsense story telling. It’s a very curious blend but it just works so perfectly. Another easy analogy might be John LeCarre meets J. R. R. Tolkien but... well, you get where I’m coming from.

In the novels, Anton and his co-workers are all magicians ranging from 7th to 1st level practitioners, their status depending on how far they can travel into the “twilight”... a series of magical reflections of the world connected to each other like Russian Matryoshka dolls, with sinister blue moss growing everywhere and which provides the magicians with their powers on all the versions of the world, including the one we live in (although in our level of the world, the blue moss is invisible). In The Last Watch, the twilight itself was under question and the fate of the world was again in the balance... but one of the characters, and I’m not telling you which, found a way to climb past the accessible levels of the twilight and into a revelation which I surely won’t reveal here.

In The New Watch, we again follow the day to day adventures of Anton, along with his wife and daughter (one of whom plays a special role within the narrative outcome, once more) and we also have the return of a character which has become, by the end of the novel, Anton’s personal Moriarty kind of character... or at the very least, his Irene Adler substitute. And that’s all I can tell you of the plot and what happens. These books are so good you are going to want to read them yourself to find out what the fuss is and I’m certainly not going to spoil them for you.

What I will say though is that this book has started in with even more references to contemporary pop fiction (not to mention Russian pop music) than the previous one. To give you some idea... one of the previous books had one of the characters dreaming about an alternative reality which was, in fact, a dream of an iconic scene from the movie version of The Night Watch. Which in itself shows you just how different these books are from the so-called adaptations of them... the sequence never even took place in the original novel.

Due to the prominence now of books and especially mainstream movies dealing with magical themes, I think it’s far to say that The New Watch has an abundance of appropriate and not quite irritating postmodernistic references to literary phenomenon like the Harry Potter and Lord Of The Rings series. There’s even a really nice reference to Boris and Arkady Strugatsky’s seminal sci-fi novel Roadside Picnic, which was itself made into a masterpiece of cinema by director Andrei Tarkovsky under the title Stalker. On the whole though this doesn’t go too far and doesn’t slow things down too much and the writer certainly appropriates his references with care, usually to either illustrate a plot point or to give you insight into a character or group of characters. So this really didn’t bother me.

One thing I will say is, after a pitched battle sequence concluding the first of the three interconnecting stories which make up this latest volume, there’s a lot less action in the book and more of Lukyanenko’s, almost trademark, philosophical discussion... which is okay. This is what good speculative science fiction does best and here he uses the metaphor of both the light and dark magicians possibly feeling they are superior to human beings as a comparison to the way the upper class treat the lower classes in Russia (and the world). Which is pretty good and though it might be considered that this slows the action down a little in some places... it’s also really compelling and the book never once gets boring and, if you’re anything like me, you’ll be speeding through it at a very fast rate.

Once again, the stakes are very high in this one and the very future of both humankind and the twilight is in balance. A sense of danger and the realisation that nothing is going to be resolved without some kind of major sacrifice permeates the second half of the novel, as more revelations of a creature dubbed “The Tiger”, which is created by the very twilight itself, are revealed... and once again the weight of the world rests on the shoulders and actions of just one man... Anton Goredetsky.

If you’re a fan of the previous novels in the series then you are going to love how this one turns out (especially since there’s at least one loose thread deliberately left dangling which cries out for another sequel) and you should grab a copy as soon as you can. On the other hand, if you’ve not read any of these, then don’t start with this one. Like all the best fiction containing running characters, the characters grow and mature as the novels continue and you will want to watch them grow as you read... so read them in the order highlighted above if you’re a stranger to the series. Either way, whichever one of these books you make a bee line for, you’re bound to have a good time. Another masterful entry into one of the best series of contemporary fantasy novels. You won’t be disappointed.