My newest favourite Russian Author!

There's something about Russian authors that I really love, the latest is Sergei Lukyanenko. The book I'm reading is The Night Watch and I seem to remember a movie being made about this - and if I'm remembering the right movie, it was made by a Russian/Polish director producer.

It's a fantasy novel about vampires and like all my favourite Russian writers is beautifully crafted writing with pangs of melancholy and fatalism. But the weird thing is how history and politics influences even fantasy writing - it is such an interesting read. The day watch are the bad guys and the night watch are the good guys but they never fight - they merely keep watch over each other. When the night watch does something good, it automatically entitles the day watch to do something bad to keep the balance. (Ok, that's an embarrassingly simplistic paraphrasing...) The interesting part is how these night watch people act as a type of "security police" and when they come across vampires, they have to show their implanted tag which glows a luminous blue and this automatically relays any offenses or violations of their treaties and laws. It's amazing how that part of Russian history and social "programming" has such and ingrained effect that it even crops up in fantasy. It's as though that's the only way of life they know - being policed constantly. The story itself grapples with all the usual moral and ethical dilema's of trying to control and police people - especially people who haven't committed any crimes, but who harbour the potential for crimes. I'm onto Story Two, but if I hit any "oh no, why did the writer feel the necessity to shove that in??" parts, I'll be sure to make another blog entry and let everyone know as soon as I've shut the book.

I once read an Anne Rice book and it started out so brilliantly - the synopsis on the cover sounded so revitting - recalling my rusty knowledge of Egyptian and Mesopotamian art & architectural history. But the story turned out to be a complete disappointment. Not only did it feel like she was dragging the story out to fill a page number quota that her publisher had insisted on, but it became evident that her publisher had also insisted on a little M&B scene just for the masses.