The Watch
Ratings1
Average rating5
15
Ratings1
Average rating5
When an enigmatic visitor from another world appears at the deathbed of Peter Alexeivich Kropotkin in 1921 Russia, offering him a chance to be reborn, Peter gladly accepts, but his new life in 1999 America is far from idyllic as he is faced with a bizarre new world of plastic and capitalism, where other refugees, both past and present, crave freedom and justice.
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I quite enjoyed this and don't think I've read anything else like it. Chapter after chapter, there doesn't seem to be conflict. Everything goes well for Kropotkin, but it's incredibly readable all the same. Maybe because there's this sense of dread hanging over the whole thing. The ultimate villain isn't a character, although one is placed in that role. The villain is the system, the status quo, capitalism, the state, and all of us who make it happen. And you might suspect that villain will win, because it usually does in real life.
At the same time there's hope everywhere in this story. Each time a character pulls their head out of the morass to speak to the person next to them they prove the problem isn't all-encompassing. And if the hero is too good to be true, I'm okay with that once in a while. The rest of us need an ideal by which to gauge reality and we're not going to find one of those unless we invent it.
