I read Metro 2033, but I think I'd rather just take the tube...

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So, this is quite the tonal departure from pretty much all the other books I’ve written about thus far on this blog, and I suppose it’s to say that in a shock twist, I do actually read books that don’t centre around queer characters. It doesn’t happen very often, because why should I read about non-queer characters if I don’t have to? But still, I read Metro 2033 by Dmitry Glukhovsky – the novel which inspired the 2009 video game of the same name.

Now, I’m writing about this book because it’s one of those that I’ve had on my shelf, probably, for years – alongside a series of Dragon Age books. And it finally made its way off my shelf because I got around to playing the game, after having the game sat in my Steam library for years. For a quick review of the game: I was underwhelmed, and I don’t agree with the 81 it has on Metacritic. But ultimately, I figured that since the game was based off a book, the book would do the story more justice than the game since there are obviously nuances that a game released in the Xbox 360 era will miss that the book won’t.

So, the blurbaroni and cheese says that the year is 2033, and the remains of humanity live in metro stations – and the real only focus for humanity is survival at any cost. Then our main character, Artyom, living in the northernmost inhabited station on the line, is given the task of alerting, basically the whole of, the metro about this “new threat” that has cropped up, and that he holds the fate of the whole metro in his hands.

I will say that immediately, that’s very vague, and gave me very “Do something, Charlie!” energy. I would have liked some hint as to what kind of threat it was. Is it some other group of people? Is it monsters? Is it something supernatural? I’d have liked a hint. Because this is something so vague, and had I just read this blurb in a shop, I’m not sure whether I would have ended up buying the book. I can confidently say that I bought this book – I don’t remember when I bought it, as a separate point – because I knew the game already existed and I was like, “Ooh, I’ve heard of that game.” And having already played the game, I knew the vibe I was expecting from the book. I was expecting dark, dreary, haunting, post-apocalyptic.

So, this book follows Artyom (24, I believe) who was born just before the world ended, so he’s not like the people who were born underground – the people who pretty much can’t bare the radiation or sunlight from the surface. So, it’s fair to say that Artyom is built different.

Now, I’ll start with what I liked about this book. And I can’t lie, there’s not a lot of it. But for one, I thought it was really interesting seeing how the world had adapted to living underground. Clocks, for one, specifically: It’s mentioned that the stations in the metro system often take good care of their clocks since the concepts of day and night became a lot more foreign – obviously, since everyone is underground. But they would take care of their clocks, so people could tell the actual time, and then there were places in this world that would turn down their lights and impose noise restrictions at certain times of day, so that people knew when it was “night”. Like I said, I thought that was really interesting.

I’ll also give it to the book that it really did capture the dark and dreary feeling of the world very well. However, that came as a double-edged sword for this book. There are a lot of things that happened in this book, and a lot of them got grouped together in the same chapters. I would have liked it if the events were more broken up, but I understand why they weren’t. It was down to the fact that by mushing everything together, it does help capture that dreary, survival-is-a-must, feel to the world. I just didn’t like it, personally. Because when everything was mushed together, I couldn’t really tell how far through things I was, or just how intensely I should feel about things. Like when Artyom went to the surface for the first time, it should have been this whole, momentous, occasion, but since that event was melted in with everything else, it just kind of got lost in the slog of everything else. So, because I couldn't tell how I should be feeling, I just didn't feel.

And this next point might be because I’m used to YA, but there was a lot of explanation in this book. Like, there was backstory in the book to what happened to the world, how the state of the world was going, how Artyom was raised and the political state of the world. And all of that was sort of just exposition dumped within the first 20 pages, and it just didn’t need to be – it could have been spread throughout the book. Or the bits like how the world ended, and how the world is politically, could have been removed and added in a little compendium at the end. Because of all this, the book felt like a slog to read through at times, like, it fully bored me.

I’ll give an example about the above paragraph. The book talks about how metro lines are sometimes referred to by their colour on metro maps, and how Artyom lived on the red line. The book then proceeded to give a detailed history on the red line that it really didn’t need to and that I, frankly, didn’t care about. The book just felt bloated with so much unnecessary detail. I know that the book was meant to be Artyom’s journey through, basically, the dark, so he’s trapped a lot with his thoughts, so there are going to be things like this. But it should have been the journey that felt laborious, not the book.

And finally, there were a few spelling and grammar errors I noticed, particularly in chapter 13. One that said something about a flashlight’s “bean” instead of its “beam”, and one on the last page of the chapter that said, “take the machine guns with your” instead of “you”. Now the book is like 450 pages, so it wouldn’t surprise me had a few slipped through with just how many words this book is, but when there are two in the same chapter, so close together, that I’ve noticed… Mary… it’s not it.

Anyway, that’s it for this… I can’t say that I enjoyed Metro 2033, and to be quite honest, the book did bore me, so I shan’t be going on to read the further books in this series.

            Okay, bye!