The Twilight Watch: Does what we expect

The Twilight Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko

The Inquisition carefully manages the balance of power between the Day and Night Watch, and nowhere in the world is it as precarious as in Moscow. At any given moment, the leaders of the Moscow Watches, Gesser and Zabulon, could carry out a diabolical scheme to seize power for their side in this never-ending cold war of magicians. As always, middle-class magician-detective Anton Gorodetsky is caught in the middle. As always, the world does not make sense. The magicians feel like they must regulate their own activities to keep balance, all the while wondering whether there is a difference between the light and the dark, and of course completely aware that there are cosmic forces for good and evil that will keep both teams roughly even no matter what they do.

So what’s the point?

Perhaps Sergei Lukyanenko has finally caught on that he has written himself into a dead end. In the third novel of the Watch series, The Twilight Watch, he sends Anton out of Moscow in order to expand this universe of confused magicians.

This works quite well when we are introduced to new magic users like Arina. Arina is a witch and her magic is alien to both Anton and his girlfriend, the sorceress Svetlana. There’s no underlying logic for this magic, but in this series readers have to accept this as part of the ride. And it works quite well when Lukyanenko carefully brings these unusual talents into conflict with one another.

However, Arina’s introduction is just a warm up to the real game-changer: ancient, (probably) mythical lore seems to be returning to the modern world. When Anton discovers that the “Book of Fuaran” might be real, a whole new topic for vacillation begins: Does the book exist? It couldn’t. It must! No, surely it doesn’t… Does it? If it does exist, it could change the relationship between the Others and humanity forever. Or not.

Somehow, Lukyanenko manages to make endless speculation interesting by attaching it to another investigation — the true strength of this series. In fact, there are, as always, three investigations that work independently but add up to a larger narrative arc. Lukyanenko has used this larger arc to put the world at risk before, but this time it looks like humanity will almost certainly be destroyed if Gorodetsky doesn’t figure out the mystery, rally the troops, and lead the charge against the common threat. The problem is: even if he does unravel this mystery, how will he get scheming vampires, scheming wizards and scheming warlocks to cooperate?

On the whole, The Twilight Watch does what we might expect the third novel of an SFF series to do: stakes are raised, relationships are complicated, and the magic world is expanded. There’s little in The Twilight Watch that will prevent the already converted from enjoying this novel.