Let It Come Down by Paul Bowles

Let It Come Down by Paul Bowles

A drifting American bank clerk steps into the corrupt International Zone of Tangier, where every freedom carries a devastating cost.

In Let It Come Down, Paul Bowles plots the doomed trajectory of Nelson Dyar, a New York bank teller who comes to Tangier in search of a different life and ends up giving in to his darkest impulses.

The city's polyglot enclaves offer Dyar no escape from his internal paralysis, as an unventilated travel agency entangles him in the shadow economy of the Medina.

Bowles captures a pervasive atmosphere of unease across the rainy port, surrounding his displaced clerk with predatory socialites and cynical expatriates. The narrative presents a sharp and disquieting study of isolation, tracking a routine errand with illicit banknotes as it unravels into reckless impulse.

Rich in descriptions of the corruption and decadence of the International Zone in the last days before Moroccan independence, Bowles's second novel is an alternately comic and horrific account of a descent into nihilism.

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• Literary Noir: An illicit courier errand involving eighteen hundred five-pound notes in a Virginian tobacco carton embroils Dyar in a covert exchange through the Jewish quarter, where every broker operates beyond official scrutiny.
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• Existential Thriller: An invitation to the Villa Hesperides pulls Dyar into the orbit of Daisy de Valverde, an eccentric hostess who dispenses ginger-and-fig majoun beside a circular glass bedroom overlooking the strait.
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• American Expat: Across waterfront cafes and the private rooms of the Bar Lucifer, an imperious gin-drinking heiress, a teenage courtesan named Hadija, and an outcast nobleman draw the adrift New Yorker into their competing schemes.
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• Dark Psychological Thriller: A midnight voyage in an ancient open launch strands Dyar in an isolated stone cottage above the mountain village of Agla, where rain, solitude, and potent kif dissolve the boundaries of reality.
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• Also by This Author: The Sheltering Sky, The Spider's House and The Delicate Prey.
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Professor of Economics and International Studies at the University of Northern British Columbia in Canada, Paul Bowles