Sean Stewart's contemporary fantasy Resurrection Man opens with a character performing his own autopsy, making the reader wonder what Stewart could possibly do for an encore. The Night Watch skips ahead to the year 2074 to provide another heady dollop of supernatural horror as artists, soldiers, rulers, diplomats, lovers, and centenarians wrestle with their inner angels and demons. Stewart paints a vivid future manipulated by inscrutable deities and inhabited by complex characters who must struggle to make moral choices without fully understanding the forces at work around them-in other words, real people.
Set in the Canadian cities of Edmonton and Vancouver, this winter's tale conveys the grim desperation of a post-apocalyptic society. But instead of the usual nuclear holocaust, deadly plague, or environmental calamity, this catastrophe was brought about by the Dream of 2004--a tidal wave of magic which swept away huge chunks of our modern world of science and reason. Seventy years later, the tide of magic is ebbing, dribbling out between humanity's toes as inexorably as beach sand. That might not be a bad thing, considering what the supernatural has bestowed. Rivers have thrown off their dams. A sentient and malevolent forest has taken over much of Vancouver. The defenders of the downtown business district battle minotaurs, gargoyles, and other grotesqueries. Indeed, the progeny of magic are as horrific as any radiation-spawned mutants of more conventional SF novels. Even in the pockets of rationalism, such as southern Edmonton, children are sacrificed to the gods.
Where Resurrection Man provided an intimate, even claustrophobic, examination of the intricacies of one family's struggle with the consequences of chaotic magic, The Night Watch pulls back to focus on the sweeping social changes and political intrigue brought about by the presence of angels, gods and ghosts. In fact, much of the fascination of The Night Watch springs from Stewart's astute depiction of the cultural differences between Vancouver's Chinese immigrants and the Caucasian "Snows" of Edmonton, not the least of which are their disparate ways of coping with the supernatural. At one point, a Snow brought to Vancouver thinks how much nicer it is "to live as they did back home, with all their gods and spirits locked away, instead of having them everywhere underfoot as they were here."
The Night Watch portrays an unforgiving landscape in which winter's cold drives bone deep. In one scene, however, the story becomes too reminiscent of Jack London's "To Build a Fire." A minor flaw, given the book's strengths.
Stewart has produced an elegantly rich novel that is, in turn, philosophical, poetic, witty, gripping, and compulsively readable. Refreshingly, The Night Watch is a near future novel that doesn't trot out the usual bunch of kick-ass Americans to save the world from evil.
Go to the main Nova Express Home Page
Go to Lawrence Person's Home Page
After almost drowning in a deluge of Korean Spam, I'm now munging my e-mail address, so please remove all the "H"s from the following to e-mail me: lawrencehh@hiho.com
Like every other web page in the universe, this one is Under Construction.