A New York bank teller flees to postwar Tangier, trading safety for illicit currency and an irreversible personal unraveling.
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.
Set against a shadowy web of counterfeit travel bureaus, the narrative follows Dyar into an illicit sterling transaction with local money-changers. Bowles surrounds his drifting American with predatory expatriates and dissolute hostesses, tracking a reckless flight into the barren mountains of the Spanish Zone.
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.
- Psychological Thriller: An alienated New Yorker’s search for autonomy devolves into waking dread as sleeplessness, majoun, and a briefcase of illicit cash dissolve every familiar certainty. What begins as a casual departure from routine turns into an inescapable psychological trap.
- Morally Grey Hero: Haunted by ten motionless years behind a bank cage, Nelson Dyar drifts into crime not from ambition, but from an urgent, reckless need to feel genuinely alive. Stripped of moral guideposts, his detachment leaves him open to every destructive impulse.
- International Intrigue: In an unpoliced treaty port divided among rival foreign powers, disgraced financiers, Soviet agents, and aristocratic smugglers operate in plain sight. A clandestine transfer of nine thousand pounds sterling pulls Dyar into a web where no transaction is clean and no alliance holds.
- Slow Burn: Bowles builds atmospheric tension through the damp winter air of Tangier, from the flickering gasoline lamps of the Zoco Chico to the desolate crags of the Spanish Zone. Dyar’s internal unraveling tightens across rain-slicked alleys and rocky mountain trails until retreat is impossible.
- Also by This Author: The Sheltering Sky, The Spider’s House and The Delicate Prey.