The last adventure

-an English synopsis of the book Metro 2035

William Sönnerhed SA18K

Imagine living in a system of dark tunnels, only accompanied by pigs, mushrooms and
the last remaining people on earth. That is the harsh reality described in the
post-apocalyptic science-fiction novel Metro 2035 (Glukovsky, 2016) which takes
place 22 years after World War Three in the Mosco metro. It is the final instalment
of the trilogy where we get to follow the protagonist Artyom Dark one last time
through the tunnels. The metro is a small-scale depiction of society. Its stations
which has become city-states have different ideological backgrounds, alliances and
enemies who they either co-operate with or annihilate. The main goal of the book is
to show the reader how everything is not as it seems and how people sometimes do
not want to hear the truth.

The novel’s story begins on Exhibition station, Artyom’s home. This station is
close to the surface but is still able to withstand most of the background
radiation from the nuclear warhead thanks to the gigantic hermetic doors installed
during The Cold War. These combined with pigs, mushroom farms and stored supplies
makes it possible to live in the tunnels.

It has now been one year since he left his duties in the Ranger Order and married
the commander’s daughter Anna. Scarred from past adventures on the surface makes
Artyom go up to the devastated city many times a week with radio equipment to try
to communicate with the rest of the world. He tries to hear what he heard two years
ago, someone else on the empty radio waves. However, this exposes him to severe
amounts of background radiation, which slowly kills him, but also tears his
marriage apart with Anna.

However, this changes when a mysterious man comes to Exhibition to speak to Artyom.
His name is Homer and says that he has information about another city who survived
called Polar Dawns. Intrigued by the old man, Artyom decides to join him on an
adventure through the metro to Teyatralnaya station to find a radio operator called
Umbach. They bribe their way through the merchant alliance Hanza, work as
“terrorists” for the Neo-Nazi faction “The Fourth Reich” and infiltrates the
communist red line just to meet the radio operator. Unfortunately, they are too
late. He has already been executed. The reds discover their bluff and hands them
over to the Reich who then enslaves them. Homer gets freed to write Nazi
propaganda, but Artyom get used as slave labour. Later he barely escapes when the
Reich and the reds start a war. In the chaos he finds out that the reds are
building something on the surface. He reunites with Homer, determined to inspect
what the reds are up to.

The turning point in the book is when it is explained that jammers have been
installed on the surface to interrupt the radio waves to hide Moscow from the rest
of the world, since there are survivors in other cities. They have also not been
built by the reds, but by an organisation called “The Invisible Observers”. All
factions have since the beginning only been bluffs created by them to keep the
people in the metro where they can control them. This infuriates Artyom who
desperately tries to expose the truth about the situation, but to deaf ears. People
simply call him crazy, except for his wife Anna. No one else wants to follow him,
because the metro is now their new home where they have a new purpose. The book
ends with Artyom and Anna simply hijacking a car and leaving the metro… forever.