Product Description

The Night Watch series has caused a sensation never before seen in Russia -- its popularity is frenzied and unprecedented, and driven by a truly great, epic story. In 2005 Fox Searchlight announced it had acquired the Russian film adaptation for an American release. Interest in the books here is now set to reach a fever pitch.

Set in modern day Moscow, Night Watch is a world as elaborate and imaginative as Tolkien or the best Asimov. Living among us are the "Others," an ancient race of humans with supernatural powers who swear allegiance to either the Dark or the Light. A thousand-year treaty has maintained the balance of power, and the two sides coexist in an uneasy truce. But an ancient prophecy decrees that one supreme "Other" will rise up and tip the balance, plunging the world into a catastrophic war between the Dark and the Light. When a young boy with extraordinary powers emerges, fulfilling the first half of the prophecy, will the forces of the Light be able to keep the Dark from corrupting the boy and destroying the world?

An extraordinary translation from the Russian by noted translator Andrew Bromfield, this first English language edition of Night Watch is a chilling, engrossing read certain to reward those waiting in anticipation of its arrival.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4745 in Books
• Published on: 2006-07-26
• Released on: 2006-07-26
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 464 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Set in contemporary Moscow, Lukyanenko's fantastic American debut—the first in a series about an epic struggle between good and evil—charts the adventures of a race of supernaturally gifted Others, who serve either the Light or Dark Side. The Others slip in and out of an eerie parallel world where they coexist in an uneasy peace that a terrible revolution may soon disrupt. Philosophical Anton Gorodetsky, an earnest Night Watch agent, falls in love with 24-year-old Svetlana Nazarova, a troubled young doctor under a Dark Magician's curse. While Anton endeavors to undo the curse, he discovers Egor, a gifted boy unwilling to choose between his Light or Dark abilities. As humankind's fate hangs in the balance, Anton is forced to re-examine his allegiance, and Svetlana is drawn deeper into the exotic, vivid universe of dueling magicians, shape-shifters, witches and vampires. Potent as a shot of vodka, this compelling urban fantasy was adapted to a Russian blockbuster movie in 2004. (July)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
Brace yourself for Harry Potter in Gorky Park. Sergei Lukyanenko's Night Watch is the beginning of a sprawling fantasy series set in modern-day Moscow about a young man and his owl, who belong to a magical police force that protects humanity from "vampires, werewolves, incubuses and succubuses, active witches, all sorts of troublesome riffraff from the lower levels." The first volume (Nochnoi Dozor) appeared in Russia in 1998, and so far the trilogy has sold more than 3 million copies abroad. Director Timur Bekmambetov originally planned a television series based on the books but instead produced a lush, violent and baffling movie (with lots of product placement) that was hailed as post-Soviet Russia's first blockbuster. Fox Searchlight released it in the United States this spring with enough magic to trick fantasy-thriller fans into seeing a movie with subtitles (the DVD, dubbed in English, went on sale this summer), and two more installments are already headed our way. Till then, you can play the "Night Watch" video game from CDV Software ($39.99). Action figures at McDonald's can't be far behind.

But what about the book -- just published in America -- at the center of this international vortex of spin-offs? The key to its wild popularity in Mother Russia may be the way Lukyanenko recasts Russia from a bankrupt, has-been world power to a place where the forces of Good and Evil will finish their long battle. Communism, you see, was just an experiment that went awry in a land where experiments can still take place. The Moscow of Night Watch may look gritty and grim, but within its murky new freedom anything might happen. "The potential of Europe and North America has already been exhausted," Lukyanenko writes. "Everything that was possible has already been tried there. . . . All those countries are already half asleep. A healthy retiree in shorts with a digital camera -- that's the prosperous countries of the West. We need to experiment with the young ones."

But for Muggles who live outside that land of grand potential, say, in one of those exhausted, prosperous countries of the West, this fantasy novel's appeal will have to rest on its characters, its suspense and its themes. At the risk of being cursed by a Dark Magician, I have to say that's a long shot. Night Watch suffers from the pretentiousness and humorlessness that frequently weigh down stories that capitalize the words Good and Evil, as in "Evil has no need to bother with eliminating Good. It's far simpler to let Good fight against itself." I must remember this the next time my wife claims the car is making a funny noise.

The story involves a race of super-humans called the "Others," who live and work alongside us, feeding off the negative or positive mental energy that ordinary human beings produce. They fade in and out of a gray fourth dimension known as the Twilight that overlays our natural world. These Others are born to regular human parents, but when each Other comes of age, he or she must choose to join the Light or the Dark side: "If you always put yourself and your own interests first, then your path leads through the Darkness. If you think about others, it leads toward the Light."

If you've studied the Gospel According to George Lucas, you'll recognize the sappy metaphysics of Night Watch, but Lukyanenko lays on a heavy gloss of realpolitik: The forces of Light and Dark are locked in a thousand-year-old Cold War, bound by an ancient truce that keeps the world from being destroyed. Each side maintains a Watch to ensure that the opposite side is not violating the terms of the peace treaty by interfering illegally with the direction of human history. Large sections of the novel sound like Henry Kissinger channeling Obi-Wan Kenobi on the importance of maintaining this balance of power, even if innocent individuals must be sacrificed along the way.

Anton, the narrator, is a low-level member of the Night Watch, the officers who keep track of the Dark Others. Like any good young hero, he's just an ordinary guy (with superpowers) who is told at the crucial moment: "Now you're our only hope." He's deeply conflicted about the nature of his work, he's frustrated by the wrong-headed orders that come down from on high, and, of course, he falls in love with the woman he's sent to protect. She's a beautiful doctor named Svetlana, who doesn't initially realize she's an Other with enormous magical power (which makes you wonder how good a doctor she is).

The overarching plot of the novel concerns Anton's reluctant participation in Svetlana's recruitment, training and preparation for a dangerous interference in the Destiny of mankind: a little boy, whom both sides hope to claim as their Great One. In each of the novel's three sections, Anton struggles through a torturous crisis of faith that leads up to a climactic confrontation with the forces of Evil, only to realize in the final paragraphs that his boss, a Great Magician of the Light, has planned the whole thing as a decoy to distract everyone (including us) from some secret plan off-stage. The trick ending of the first section was fairly clever; the trick ending of the second section was a little annoying; and by the end of the third, I wanted to shove somebody's magic wand up the Dark Place.

This is a shame because the novel contains some captivating scenes and all kinds of marvelous, inventive detail: The vampires' seduction of a teenage boy is bone-chilling; every time Lukyanenko described the Other-worldly Twilight, I felt lured into it; and the fantastical powers exercised by Anton and his colleagues range from delightful to awesome: changing the weather in the living room, transforming into animals, "remoralizing" whole blocks of people. But the clunky language of Night Watch in translation constantly shatters its magic: As a girl-vampire moves in for the kill, for instance, Anton says, "Things were looking really bad now." A few pages later, he tells us, "This was getting really interesting!" When he gets rescued by a passing car, he says, "Things like this just didn't happen! Heroes only got rescued by passing cars in cheap action movies."

Say, there's an idea. Or maybe a TV show. Or a sequel. And a video game.

Use the Force, Luk.

Reviewed by Ron Charles
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Review
“Night Watch is an epic of extraordinary power.”
—Quentin Tarantino

“Star Wars meets the Vampires in Moscow . . . it bursts with a sick, carnivorous glee in its fiendish games.”
—The New York Times

“The Night Watch is inventive, sardonic and imbued with a surprising sense that, for this author and his audience, much of this stuff is new-minted.” —The Independent (UK)

A “sceptical, intelligent thriller.”–Telegraph (UK)

“Fascinating. . . . [The] excellent translation by Andrew Bromfield keeps the pace moving. . . . One of the most original and readable supernatural fictions in some time.”–Scotland on Sunday

“Brace yourself for Harry Potter in Gorky Park. . . . The novel contains some captivating scenes and all kinds of marvelous, inventive detail: The vampires’ seduction of a teenage boy is bone-chilling; every time Lukyanenko described the Other-worldly Twilight, I felt lured into it; and the fantastical powers exercised by Anton and his colleagues range from delightful to awesome.”– Ron Charles, The Washington Post Book World

“Lukyanenko is great at rolling out new concepts for the reader to savour.”–The Sydney Morning Herald (Australia)

“[As] potent as a shot of vodka. . . . [A] compelling urban fantasy.”–Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“This modern day mythical fantasy is Anne Rice on an epic scale, a hugely imagined world. A chiller thriller from cold of Russia, this one's been selling like hot cakes around the world.” —Sunday Sport

Customer Reviews

Fantastically Russian
Night Watch is a good read, at a good pace, with a really excellent lead character. I read the book after seeing the movie, but before learning that the American version of the movie was heavily butchered due to movies execs worrying about how the movie would translate. After reading this novel, I'm anxious to find the "real" version of the movie and watch it properly, and I've got the next two books at the top of my reading stack.

The biggest part of the novel for me wasn't the action or the plot specifics or even the secondary characters, but Russia itself and the classic Russian lead of Anton. Other reviewers say the book is a bit plodding- I felt this was an excellent portrayal of the general malaise of a post- Cold War Russia. Some say that Anton is a weak hero- He drinks himself nearly to oblivion and rants about the terrible misfortune of his life, what could be more Russian? I wound up wanting to share some vodka with the guy because I could picture myself in the same shoes, under this bizarre set of circumstances.

It's that sense of mood, and of Russia as a wonderful backdrop, that this story becomes possible. The book is actually divided into 3 novellas, each comprising a separate story rather like a set of serials. Even then, this book as a whole leaves most questions unanswered, and this is a good thing. You only ever get to know just as much as Anton knows, and throughout the book you're only experiencing things from his perspective. The book is in three novellas because that's how Anton lives his life- one story after another, and he tries his best to wash his hands of the last event before he winds up in another one. You join almost in medias res because Anton rarely bothers explaining or planning, he just tries to make do with the situation he's handed.

All in all, I can't recommend this book enough. Sure, I've barely mentioned the fireballs and the werewolves and the amulets and the computer databases. Everything combines to make a wonderfully now, fantastically Russian, yet somehow completely mystic setting where there's this whole world we can't see right in the middle of our own, and in some ways it's not much different from our own. But all of that is really secondary to the setting, and the wonderful ride as we follow Anton around in his work.

Definitely pick this one up. Just understand that you're getting less of an epic adventure (Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings), and more of a socio-political drama (War and Peace comes to mind for some reason). The book still has a lot of interesting combat and magic and suspense, but it doesn't meet the usual definition of a page-turner because of Anton's more melancholy take on things.

Psychological fantasy
THE NIGHT WATCH by Sergei Lukyanenko is the first book of the Night Watch Trilogy set in modern-day Moscow. The fantasy tale carries the voice of a young man named Anton Gorodetsky who belongs to a magical force called the "Night Watch" that protects humanity from the "Day Watch" consisting of vampires, werewolves, witches, and the list goes on. At the beginning, Anton is a low-level but apparently an important member of the Watch (he just doesn't know it yet) and is about to be sent to the field for a mission although he is not a field operative.

Anton is one of the extraordinary humans called the "Others" who live and work alongside humans. As an Other, Anton can enter in and out of another dimension known as the Twilight. When an Other comes of age, he or she must choose to join the Light or the Dark side. This is the case for Egor, a young boy who got himself into trouble when a vampire 'calls' him (he's about to become 'food'). Egor is a young unfledged Other (he doesn't know it) and his time hasn't come for him to choose sides. At the same time of the Egor incident, Anton is to find a woman who is under a Dark Magician's curse. She's a beautiful and innocent doctor named Svetlana, also an uninitiated Other who potentially possesses great magical powers.

Another thing to watch for in the story is that each side--the Light and the Dark--honours a treaty to ensure that the opposite side is not violating the terms by interfering illegally with the direction of human history. The story gets a little bit philosophical and in my humble opinion, makes a tedious read as it keeps emphasizing most of the time, on the importance of maintaining this balance of power.

The book has three parts. I was excited upon finishing part one of the story but as part two and three unfolds, I got a little tired. Still, it makes an interesting read because of the modus operandi of the Watches, the other-worldly Twilight that will happily make any of the Others a permanent resident should they ever commit something wrong, the emotional conflicts and struggles between good and evil, and a host of other supernatural stuff.

Loved it more than the movie
The book is really a compalation of 3 different stories rapped into one. It does follow Anton's life mostly but the other characters are more prevalent too. You learn a lot more about the others and the reasons for the fuding than what the movie gives you; that is from the Night Watch (Light Others) perspective. i just liked the character development and the characters themselves so much more. actually the movie took the different stories and then just plopt Anton into the major character role. highly recommend, it starts off slow but that's most first books in a series.
*Semi Spoiler Alert* For instance it wasn't he that went to the witch to kill his ex's unborn child and said child doesn't end up being his either.