Blurb:

The novel that gave birth to the video games 'Metro 2033' and 'Metro: Last Light' The breathtaking original story that inspired both the METRO 2033 and METRO: LAST LIGHT video games! An international bestseller, translated into 35 languages. Set in the shattered subway of a post apocalyptic Moscow, Metro 2033 is a story of intensive underground survival where the fate of mankind rests in your hands. In 2013 the world was devastated by an apocalyptic event, annihilating almost all mankind and turning the earth’s surface into a poisonous wasteland. A handful of survivors took refuge in the depths of the Moscow underground, and human civilization entered a new Dark Age. The year is 2033. An entire generation has been born and raised underground, and their besieged Metro Station-Cities struggle for survival, with each other, and the mutant horrors that await outside. Artyom was born in the last days before the fire. Having never ventured beyond his Metro Station-City limits, one fateful event sparks a desperate mission to the heart of the Metro system, to warn the remnants of mankind of a terrible impending threat. His journey takes him from the forgotten catacombs beneath the subway to the desolate wastelands above, where his actions will determine the fate of mankind. BURIED. ALIVE. It is now two decades since the planet was convulsed by the Final War, which flashed across the continents, engulfing all of them in an instant, to close the final chapter in our history. Deployed in this war, the most advanced inventions and greatest discoveries of the human genius drove the human race back into caves, submerging civilization forever in the impenetrable gloom of a final Dark Age. Nowadays, in the year 2033, no one can recall any longer what triggered the hostilities. Absurd. But if you think for a moment, what does it matter who started it? Those who unleashed the war were the first to die… And the inheritance they left to us was a smoldering ember that used to be called the Earth. The entire world lies in ruins. The human race has been almost completely exterminated. Even cities that were not totally demolished were rendered unfit to live in by the radiation. And the rumors say that beyond the city limits lie boundless expanses of scorched desert and dense thickets of mutated forest. But what really is there, no one knows. The airwaves are empty, and when the few radio operators who are left tune in for the millionth time to the frequencies on which New York, Paris, Tokyo and Buenos Aires once used to broadcast, all they hear is a dismal howl. More than twenty years have passed since the day when the final plane took off. Railroad tracks, corroded and pitted with rust, now lead nowhere. The great construction projects of the age were transformed into ruins without ever being completed and the skyscrapers of Chicago and Frankfurt were reduced to rubble. The historic districts of Rome lie smothered in moss and fungus, the Eiffel Tower, gnawed through by reddish-brown leprosy, has snapped in half. And the weeds of fiction and fantasy are flourishing on the memory of humankind’s former glory. It is only twenty years since the war ended before it had even begun. But in those twenty years the world has changed beyond all recognition. The planet has new masters now, and the human race is condemned to huddle in burrows, consoling itself with memories. The radiation and viruses with which some human beings attempted to eradicate others have brought new creatures into the world. And now they rule by right over the desolate Earth. The mutants are far better adapted to this new world than human beings. The human era is almost over. There are not many of us left, only a few tens of thousands, out of seven billion human beings. We don’t know if there were others who survived in some other place, on the other side of the world, or if we are the last humans on the planet. We live in the Moscow Metro.

Review:

As has been the case with many of my more curious interests in the literary world, I was brought to the text of Metro 2033 via my appreciation for its adaptation, the 2010 videogame of the same name from Ukrainian developers 4A Games. It was the first time, by my recollection, that I’d ever played a videogame adapted from a novel; and so I was immediately fascinated by it for that reason alone. Movies, television, stage plays? Those all made sense to me. But making a videogame from a book? Must’ve been a heck of a book. 

But there was a second facet to my curiosity with Metro 2033: the story of its rise to fame. The novel was originally published online in the halcyon days of 2002, back when we weren’t all subject the tyrannical whims of “the Algorithm” and things on the internet were actually discoverable simply through aimless wanderings across the web. The behind-the-scenes tale of Metro’s successes is the kind of thing whispered of in awe between indie authors. 

Did you know Glukhovsky just published the whole thing for free online before it got picked up by publishers?

Did you hear it had 2 million online readers before it ever went to print?

Even though I hadn’t written any of my own fiction when I first learned of the viral success of Metro 2033, I had dreams of a future in storytelling, and so back then and even now I can’t help but be a little jealous when I hear stories like this, or like those of Andy Weir’s The Martian, who similarly - after putting the whole book up for free on his website - had to deal with real human beings clamoring for him to actually sell the dang thing at which point he put a Kindle edition on Amazon and saw it rocket to best-seller status (I would give my left arm for Ridley Scott to adapt one of my books into a movie).

So what of Metro 2033?

Well, while I loved the game (and loved each of its sequels) I actually bounced off my initial attempt to read this book (in June of 2016 according to my Amazon purchases). I can’t especially recall why, though I can guess. Metro 2033 [the game] is a first-person-shooter - tense, bombastic, and horrific - but Metro 2033 [the book] is a whole different beast. It’s got tension, bombast, and horror, yes; but it is far closer in structure and texture to Homer’s Odyssey or Ovid’s Metamorphoses than its more linear and action-packed adaptation. And knowing what kind of media I was enjoying in the summer of 2016 (the delicious carnage of id Software’s 2016 DOOM reboot kept my heart rate elevated for months after I played it, and listening to even a second of Mick Gordon’s high-octane soundtrack can send me back there in an instant), I can imagine that the thoughtful, meandering, classically-literary texture of Metro 2033 was not what I was looking for when I first attempted to read it.

And so the orange Post-it note I left some quarter of the way through the book lingered there between its pages for years, through multiple moves across three states, until the moment I pulled it once again off my shelf at the beginning of May 2024.

And this time it clicked. 

For those who might’ve skimmed the above blurb or are unfamiliar with the Metro games, the story of Metro 2033 takes place almost entirely in the underground tunnels of Moscow’s Metro system following a devastating nuclear war on the surface. Our protagonist Artyom lives in the VDNKh station, near the outermost ring of the Metro system, and - key to the events of the story - near a nest of surface-dwelling creatures known as “the dark ones” who threaten to overwhelm VDNKh, and subsequently the whole Metro. 

As post-apocalyptic tales go, Metro 2033 is an interesting case. The apocalypse of Metro is recent, with many of the Metro’s inhabitants still holding fresh memories of life on the surface. Even Artyom was born prior to the war, though was little more than a toddler when the first bombs fell and the people of Moscow fled into the earth. And as the world ground to a halt in the years that followed, so too does the story of Metro 2033 begin in almost complete stillness.

Artyom and several companions are on patrol at the four hundred-fiftieth meter of the tunnel beyond VDNKh, and after scaring off some small creature back into the stygian pit of the unending tunnel, the men of the patrol sit down by the fire and talk. 

I mentioned earlier that Metro 2033 bears the texture of Homer and Ovid in that, similarly to those stories, Metro 2033’s structure is - for most of the narrative - episodic. It could easily be an anthology. An incredible amount of this book is told in monologues around the fire, as Artyom listens - sometimes for multiple pages - to the tales of his myriad companions. Sometimes they tell stories of life on the surface, sometimes they gossip about other stations, sometimes they philosophize about the nature of life in the Metro, and sometimes they prophecy about the future.

Metro 2033 thus impressed upon me, maybe intentionally, maybe not, that it was not meant to be read all at once. Like the travels of Artyom through the many stations of Moscow’s Metro, it would be valuable to take time between the stories, to pause, rest, and reflect. And so, I made a conscious effort on this read-through to take that time for rest and reflection, and only read one chapter of Metro 2033 a day. And I have to say, given the narrative density of each of Metro 2033’s chapters, I ended up incredibly happy with this pace.

Certain chapters, especially towards the end, do flow together in distinct continuity; but in the earliest moments of the book each chapter feels like a whole story unto itself - and rarely is that story entirely Artyom’s. We can almost picture Artyom as the unintentional chronicler of the tales of the Metro, an unwitting historian of his people. He is a Dante of sorts, describing his travels not through the circles of Hell, but through the winding passages of the Metro. Through his point-of-view we get a front row seat to the rich and diverse world beneath the world. 

And in one such interaction, one of Artyom’s brief companions remarks,

“Lord, what a splendid world we ruined…”

The world of Metro 2033 is incredibly ruined, and incredibly weird. And it’s in these weirder, otherworldly moments that we see just how much Metro 2033 owes to the other titan of Russian apocalyptic fiction, the Strugatsky brothers’ Roadside Picnic. In between the gentle, quiet moments of Artyom’s campfire stories are cerebral, fantastic, altogether mesmerizing moments of unsettling, eldritch horror. The quieter moments can almost lull you into forgetting that this is a world devolved by war, morphed by nuclear weapons into a waking nightmare - into a world, in some cases, beyond comprehension. 

I will not spoil the ending of this book, but suffice to say Glukhovsky has a lot to say about violence and war, (particularly about how such things - despite what war apologists will tell you - never really serve to accomplish anything except to create more tragedy), and not only that, but Glukhovsky has much to say about the people who order such action.

In Glukhovsky’s text, nationalism is as dangerous to the people of the Metro as are the irradiated, mutated monsters that stalk its blackened tunnels. In one chapter, in which Artyom is taken in by a loosely Christian monastic society, the monks’ Elder dispenses this nugget:

“Satan deceives people by inciting nationalistic pride within them and inducing them to worship political organizations… People think that their race or nation is superior to others. But it isn’t true.”

It’s clear - not even in subtext, just in the text itself - that Glukhovsky has a deep disdain for all forms of authoritarianism and all types of autocrats. The dwellers of the Metro’s “Red Line”, those who continue to fetishize the long dead Soviet Union, are narratively spit upon in the same manner as the fascist Nazis of the Metro’s “Fourth Reich”. And in a bit of symbolism that runs right up against being too on-the-nose, in the burnt-out husk of Moscow there lives beneath the Kremlin a monstrous beast that can hypnotize its prey into willfully hurling themselves into its gullet. 

These beliefs are not merely contained to Glukhovsky’s fiction. He is currently living in exile from his native Russia due to his outspoken criticism of Putin’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, criticism that earned him the prestigious honor of being “wanted” by the Russian government “under an unspecified article of the criminal code” (Reuters - June 7, 2022). 

Toward the end of Metro 2033 Arytom inner-monologue-edly remarks that his adventure has been a - as we’ve long understood - kind of odyssey, a voyage across the sprawl of Moscow’s underworld and across the otherworldly tendrils that connect its people. There is a distinct juxtaposition between the claustrophobic nature of the dimly lit tunnels and the opening of Artyom’s mind as he explores it. Mirroring the nature and original function of the Metro itself, the story of Metro 2033 is about connections, both the expected and the unexpected; and it’s about the responsibility we all bear when we make those connections with one another. 

If you’re looking for thoughtful, meandering, and thrilling exploration of a world after the end of the everything, check out Dmitry Glukhovsky’s Metro 2033.