Book Review - Metro 2035

The story

A generation after the bombs fell, the survivors of Moscow live crammed into the stations of the Metro, each one its own small, wary nation. Artyom cannot accept that this is all that remains of the world, and keeps climbing to the poisoned surface with a radio, hunting for any signal that other people are still alive out there. Metro 2035 is the final book of Dmitry Glukhovsky’s trilogy.

The end of the line

Metro 2035 was the last stop in a journey that started years ago, back when I picked up the first science fiction I ever read. The Metro books, along with everything in that same Russian, post-apocalyptic, STALKER kind of mood, were the stories that pulled me into the genre in the first place. So coming to the final novel of Glukhovsky’s saga felt like saying goodbye to something that had quietly shaped the way I read. And to my surprise, it might just be the best of them all.

Coming back to Artyom

A big part of that is Artyom. Metro 2034 had stepped away from him to follow Homer and Sasha, and as much as I appreciated that detour, I had missed him. Returning to his point of view, to his stubbornness and his impossible hope, felt like coming home. Homer was a wonderful presence here too, the old chronicler still trying to turn all of this misery into a story worth remembering. Together they carry the weight of the book without ever making it feel heavy.

The world above

What shook me the most was the slow, terrible revelation that there were people living outside the Metro network all along. The world above was never as empty as everyone had been told.

The chapter that stayed with me is the one where Artyom tries to tell the people of the Metro the truth: that there is a world out there, that they could leave Moscow, that they could try to live something close to a normal life again. And the answer he gets is not anger, or fear, or even disbelief. It is indifference. They simply do not care.

They had spent so long in the dark that the light became the thing they feared most.

That broke me a little. These people had lived underground for so long, had been hurt so deeply, that hope itself had become unbearable to them. It was easier to stay in the dark they knew than to risk the daylight they had already given up on. And it is hard not to see how real that is. You can find the same exhaustion in people living through the wars happening right now, people so worn down that the idea of a different life slowly stops feeling possible.

Where it wears you down

What I called a chapter is really a pattern. Artyom reaches a station, tells them the truth, and is sent away. Then he does it again at the next one, and again at the one after that. Glukhovsky is not subtle about any of it either. There are long stretches where the novel stops being a story and becomes a sermon, and you can feel him at your shoulder making sure you have taken the point. Somewhere in the middle I was tired of Artyom, tired of the argument, and tired of watching the same scene reset.

And I think that is the only way it could have worked. Had the Metro turned him down once, cleanly, I would have registered a sad scene and moved on. Because it turns him down for hundreds of pages, I gave up on anyone listening long before Artyom did. That is what has already happened to the people down there, and a tighter book could not have put me inside it. It is a slog, and the slog is the argument.

Anya

I have said almost nothing about Anya, and the ending does not work without her. She is Artyom’s wife, and she is also Miller’s daughter, which means the man Artyom spends the book arguing with is the man she grew up under. She works the mushroom beds at VDNKh while he goes up to the surface with his radio and comes home poisoned. What she wants is an ordinary life and a child, and he will not give her either. For much of the middle of the book the marriage is gone, and her own father tells Artyom to leave her for her own good.

She comes back to him anyway, and by then Miller’s men are holding her life over Artyom to keep him in place. So when the two of them finally get out of Moscow, it is not one man being proved right. It is two people who had nearly lost each other deciding to go together, which is a smaller thing and a better one.

Final thoughts

Artyom gets something like a happy ending, and he earns it. But the quiet tragedy of Metro 2035 is everyone he leaves behind. The people of the Metro are probably condemned to stay down there forever, not because the door was locked, but because they were too afraid to even try it. That image, of a whole world choosing the cage over the unknown, is what makes this the book in the saga I think about the most. If you have any love for bleak, deeply human science fiction, do not stop at Metro 2033. The road only gets better, and it ends here.