In September, I wrote in this blog about the game Metro: Exodus—the latest part in the trilogy about Artyom. I also briefly covered the original source material, Dmitry Glukhovsky’s Metro series. The first game followed the plot of the first book quite closely, but after that, the games and books began to diverge, though they clearly influenced each other, especially since Dmitry Glukhovsky was heavily involved in the development of the games.
I really liked the first book in the series back in the day, despite some critiques of its writing style. However, it was easy to forgive the author because the concept was so intriguing. The plot itself wasn’t new: yet another “messiah” traveling from point A to point B to bring happiness to everyone. But the setting of a post-apocalyptic world, where only a few survivors now have to live underground—this was captivating. Glukhovsky added mysticism and science fiction elements, and, unexpectedly, the book became a hit, turning Dmitry Glukhovsky into a mega-star. His books have been translated into numerous languages, Metro inspired a highly successful video game, and his relatively new novel Text was adapted into a film in Russia featuring top Russian actors. But I covered all of this in my last post, so I won’t repeat myself.
After the first book, I quickly read the second, but it featured different characters and lacked both the originality and emotional impact of the first. However, when Glukhovsky released the third book in the series in 2015, I bought it immediately and started reading right away. I managed to get through at most 100 pages before putting it down in frustration and even wrote a brief, emotional post on Facebook. I simply couldn’t keep reading—I disliked the book that much.
But after playing the third game set in the same world, I decided, five years later, to give the book another chance. This time, I finished it, though it still doesn’t come close to the first one. The best in the series remains the original, and that’s unlikely to change.
2035 once again returns us to the franchise’s main character, Artyom. This book is entirely about him once more. He’s the protagonist, the story revolves around him, and even the main characters from the second book somehow end up alongside him. However, the writing style of the third book is vastly different from the first. Yes, the first book had its linguistic flaws; it was clear that a newcomer wrote it. But in the third book, there’s a persistent feeling that it’s not even Glukhovsky who wrote it. The language has been simplified tenfold, and what used to be a story enriched with descriptions of daily life and character “growth” has largely turned into a collection of extensive dialogues and monologues. Most of these dialogues are told in crude slang, full of filth and swearing. Even back in 2015, it felt like these were just random scribbles from an amateur author, hastily pulled from some corner of the internet and loosely patched together into something resembling a coherent story.
The characters themselves have become flat, simplistic, and vulgar. They used to feel like real people, but now they’re just cardboard characters. There’s no one left to care about. It almost seems like dropping a nuclear bomb on the whole bunch wouldn’t be the worst idea. Even Artyom, the hero of the Metro, has turned into something unrecognizable. He was once intelligent and cultured (as much as one could be in a post-apocalyptic metro), but here he’s angry at everyone and everything, unable to even articulate his own thoughts. It’s as if he started drinking and devolved into a primitive state. But he didn’t even drink.
At one point, in fact, the narrative describes Artyom’s various reckless escapades, and at that point, the book becomes unreadable. Now I understand that the author wanted to depict the mess inside the mind of someone under the influence. It’s simply a stream of consciousness over many pages. But it was at this fragment that I initially abandoned the book because, as I was already not particularly enjoying it, it transformed into an unintelligible jumble of letters (not even words!).
This fragment, however, is a hyperbole of the book’s many issues. It’s far from the only place where the author indulges excessively in pure dialogue, with line after line stretching over multiple pages. And it’s presented in a way that makes it easy to lose track of who’s even speaking, what point they’re trying to make, or why any of it matters.
Back to the plot: surprisingly, it partially overlaps with the storyline of the third game in the series. In fact, the entire book feels like a slightly modified prologue to the game. But the game feels kinder, with more hope. In the book, Artyom tries to contact the outside world, but no one believes there’s anyone left alive out there. Angry at everyone, Artyom sets off on a vague mission to prove… something. Along the way, he gains a more concrete goal, but at first, it’s simply, “There’s someone who allegedly heard of people outside Moscow.”
The mysticism is gone; it’s completely absent. Even the mutant monsters have all but disappeared. What’s left is a simplified, scorched Moscow and a seedy metro.
It seems Glukhovsky wanted the book to illustrate how propaganda serves the ruling elite’s goals, reducing ordinary people to insignificance. The right ideas, when sown carefully, can make people do anything, even turn brother against brother. There’s nothing new in this concept; we’ve seen examples of such tactics seventy years ago and even today. And no matter how strong a person is, they stand no chance against the system if they’re alone.
Many people consider this book a brilliant conclusion to the story. I disagree. In my view, it upends everything the first book established. Yes, the first book had plenty of grim moments, with the Red Line and the fascists. But it showed that there was hope, that there were people willing to fight for universal human values and moral principles even in such dire conditions. This new book tramples all of that into the mud, leaving only the dirt behind.
My rating: 2.5/5
[…] the first novel, Metro 2033, the second—and especially the third—mostly surprised me, and even disappointed […]