I feel like gushing, and you will listen to me.

I am sick of fantasy trilogies, tetralogies and pentalogies. I am sick of sixteen year olds writing books about naive young men and women who have a destiny to fulfill and evil Dark Lords who rule the world and can only be defeated by…The One. I am totally bored of reading made-up names with an abundance of Z’s and X’s and Q’s in them, names that no sane person can pronounce and no parent would bestow on their children. Narratives about new worlds followed by pages and pages describing the history and geography of the areas and the day to day life of the people staying there and ….let me just say, that Tolkien’s legacy to the fantasy genre is a little too overpowering. Most fantasy narratives are more about building a new world, in which a familiar story unfolds, rather than an engaging narrative that makes you want to read faster. The end becomes clear by the time you are onto the fourth page – you know the Dark One will be defeated, and your emotional investment in the book remains confined to finding out whether the protagonist will live or die at the end of it all.

The Watch books – in case you haven’t figured out yet – also form a tetralogy. They came out in Russian, written by a gentleman named Sergei Lukyanenko and so far, out of the four books, two have been translated into English and released in the US and the UK (with minor translation differences), and I have had the good fortune of reading both of them. I am willing to lay down my art-reserved money for the next two volumes without hesitation. The Watch books are good. There is a reason why they are bestsellers in Russia, and I think, with slightly better publicity, they can be bestsellers here as well.

Each book seems to be comprised of three or four stories – call them sub-volumes if you will. When you read them, the stories appear quite disjointed, dealing with the myriad characters involved in the storyline, but towards the end of each of the main books, you find out the interlinking between them. And here Mr Lukyanenko does a splendid job of twisting multiple viewpoints into a cohesive whole. Like any other fantasy story, there are rules in the world Lukyanenko creates, and there are also secrets that bubble to the surface as you read on, but in no way do they affect the logical consistency of the world, and they aren’t deus ex machinae for the writer to wriggle out of a corner he has trapped himself into.

The premise – there are Others who live among humans, lower-ranking ones such as vampires and werewolves, and high ranking Magicians and Wizards and Shape-shifters. They derive their powers from the realm referred to as the Twilight, which is something like a different plane of reality which the Others can tap into. The higher one’s rank is, the deeper the level of Twilight one can tap into, and consequently, the greater the power. There are the good guys, those who serve the cause of Light – they treat human beings as nurturers of the world and believe in free will. And there are the Dark Ones, the Others who derive their magic by preying on humans, and who believe humans are resources that can be used to obtain greater power. The irony of the story lies here – it’s ultimately the Dark Ones who are closer to human behaviour and the concept of actual individualism, and the Light ones, with their utopian ways of thought being the ones more removed from reality. And unfortunately for both these sides, there is The Treaty, which prevents them from actively interfering in human affairs. For the Light Ones, it means that they cannot bring about world peace even if they wanted to, because every bit of magic spent for the cause of good has to be balanced by an equal usage of power for the Dark Ones. Stalemate.

Or maybe not. Because the organisations that monitor the lives of Dark Others Light Others – called the Night Watch and the Day Watch respectively – are also involved in a game of conspiracies and counter-moves orchestrated to subversively twist events into their favour. Gesar, the head of the Night Watch and the most powerful Light magician on the planet and Zabulon, his counterpart in the Day Watch are the master-planners in this game, and more often than not, their plans clash with the idealism of their subordinates.

The first story in Day Watch is about a beautiful Dark Witch named Alisa, who was once Zabulon’s lover and was cast off by him following a botched operation, which was detailed in the first book Night Watch. Alisa and the rest of her team suffer immense casualties in a new field operation, one of them being the complete loss of Alisa’s abilities to tap into the Twilight. But after the incident, Zabulon shows renewed interest in her, and sends her away from Moscow to a youth camp to recuperate, where Alisa slowly leeches off the emotions of the young girls around her to regain her powers. She meets Igor, another camp counsellor, and her interest towards him is quickly reciprocated. Love and all that. Until she discovers something odd, and finds out just how the Day Watch functions.

The second story is also told in the first person, with occasional jumps to third person in the narrative – it’s about Vitaliy, a Dark Magician from outside Moscow who cannot remember anything about his past life, and who slowly finds out that he might very well be the most powerful magician, Dark or otherwise in Moscow. A number of run-ins with the Moscow unit of the Night Watch makes him a suspect in a couple of casualties, but nobody can prove anything. The Night Watch is also concerned about a magical artifact named Fafnir’s Talon, which is intended to upset the balance between Light and Dark – with an unknown tip-off that leads to the artifact being smuggled into the city. Anton Gorodetsky, one of the key characters in Night Watch plays a major role in this storyline, Anton’s relationship with the Watch is put to the test when Zabulon approaches him with an offer that might potentially help him get back together with Svetlana, a Light Sorceress.

The third story is the one that brings the threads hanging around from the first two stories together. All through the book, we have been given hints – what role does Fafnir’s talon play in the complex plot? Why is Edgar, a second-level Dark Magician chosen to be Zabulon’s second-in-command, superseding other, more experienced Dark Magicians? How are the four Regin brothers, who brought the Talon into Moscow, connected to the scenario? What role does Igor have to play? Anton Gorodetsky and Edgar have to travel to Prague, to meet with the Inquisition, the body that watches over the Treaty, and defend the actions of the watches. Alliances are made, secrets are divulged, and we learn new things the nature of Death for an Other. The culmination is low-key, yet glorious.

What totally pwns in the series so far – the seamless mapping of the world of the Others to our world, a world where two World Wars have actually been fought and bad things happen to people every other day. I also loved the way old myths ( the story of Sigurd and Fafnir, for instance) are cast in a new light. Anton Gorodetsky, the cynical Light Magician, central to the narrative since the first book becomes the reader, in a way, a character whose enquiry into the motives and nature of Dark and Light becomes synonymous with our own efforts to bring the pieces together. The translation seems to be bang-on, no half-baked theatricality in the lines or the monologues. I know for a fact, having seen the first couple of minutes of Night Watch, that the movie diverts quite a lot from the book, and as always, I am glad I read this.

And now to wait for Dusk Watch. In the meantime, I suggest you non-fantasy-loving folks go and check out both Night Watch and Day Watch. They’re worth your time and money.