Metro 2035 — What if you were right about everything?

My copy of 2035

Metro 2035 follows Artyom once again (our young hero from 2033) after his fateful encounter in that book and the battle of D6 in the Metro’s bowels (a fight the books themselves do not cover but the video game Last Light shows). Artyom is a hero, the man who saved the Metro; he’s married, has a wife and lives back at his home station with her and his adopted father. Anna, his wife, is the daughter of the Order’s leader — the man in charge of Artyom’s special forces group.

Artyom himself has spent the last year or more running up to the surface not on Miller’s/The Order’s demand but to chase a signal he caught at the very end of 2033. For the briefest moment, he heard what sounded like a radio signal on the wire, and it has haunted him every day since then. Artyom has trekked from the Metro’s innards to the high rooftops of Moscow to try and find any trace of what he heard, climbing up 40+ floor apartment complexes and taking extreme doses of radiation, and while he does this his friends and family grow increasingly distant from him. 2035 is a book about bonds, about dedication, and about obsession. How far would you go to prove you’re right? Would you slowly, steadily kill yourself if it meant showing the ones you love that you’re correct? Would you stay in a cage if someone opened the doors for you, or flee with them into the dangerous unknown?

Every fiber of Artyom’s being is tested here: the mental, the physical, the emotional, all forced into a meat grinder that feeds on his desperation. It’s a dark book, cruel and scary, but in the distinctly human sense. People can be cruel, to themselves, to each other, for no reason, for plenty of reasons. This book doesn’t fetishize that cruelty, but it does stare at it for long periods of time. It tells you that the abyss is man-made, and that to blink would be to stay in the cage.

Now, a lot of the last two books’ flaws are present here: long rambling dialogue, sections that can be hard to track/follow, and a distinct sense that some things were lost in translation. It also has some interesting moments and decisions (ones I don’t want to spoil, since everyone’s gonna have different thoughts on them) and I’m not quite sure where I stand on them.

I’d recommend 2035, even when thinking about it makes me feel pretty nihilistic. It does its job, and caps off the book series well enough. I suppose part of what bothers me with it, thought, is that it feels a little too cruel at times — and while I get where it’s coming from, it’s sometimes a bit too much for me. On to something lighter!