A novel of a young American's surrender to evil in North Africa. ( )

Let It Come Down is an odd fish these days: an existential thriller. Set in the 50s in Morocco where Bowles spent a lot of his life it has a wonderful sense of place. Pace, however, is another matter and this essentially readable novel lurches along in a kind of staccato. The anti-hero (Dyar), and there are only anti-heroes in this Camus inspired piece, is a thoroughly unlikable man on the run from a failed life in the states to a failed life in a partitioned Morocco.
Bowles draws the ex-pat community with a sharp eyed insight that to this day chimes with ex-pats worldwide. For this alone the book is worth reading. HIs prose is well tuned and his dialogue sure. If the narrative stumbles the moral, dialectic thread is as sure footed as a mountain goat.
We follow the further fall of Dyar almost open mouthed as the ex-pats around him mouth their racist opinions of the Arab host population who themselves are stereotypically portrayed by Bowles .
It is a good book. Not a great book and certainly not one of Bowles' great works: for that you should go to his short stories. In some ways it is a a curio and an oddly dated one but that said it is worthy of your attention.

Reviewer: G. Merritt (Boulder, CO) - See all my reviews
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Paul Bowles (THE SHELTERING SKY) lived as an American expatriate in Tangier, Morocco, where he wrote LET IT COME DOWN (1952). Set in the 1950s, Bowles' novel--reminiscent of Camus' STRANGER--follows Nelson Dyar, who leaves his mundane job as a bank job in New York to work in a friend's travel agency in Tangier, where he soon discovers that the agency is only a front for an illegal currency exchange. Dyar is a "wire-haired terrier" of a man--"alert, eager, suggestible" (p. 104), but he lacks brains and soul. Although he resides in an exotic city, Dyar, as his name suggests, is essentially already a dead man living a meaningless existence. "For years," Dyar "had gone along not being noticed, not noticing himself, accompanying the days mechanically, exaggerating the exertion and boredom of the day to give him sleep at night, and using the sleep to provide the energy to go through the following day" (p. 177). Dyar describes himself as a "victim" (p. 8), and soon after his arrival in Morocco, Bowles' protagonist is victimized by the situational, exotic culture of expatriates, drugs, alcohol, and casual sex that permeates Tangier. However, Dyar is neither a sympathetic nor a likable character, who seems to live a separate existence. He falls into a meaningless relationship with Hadija, a young prostitute, who is also the object of an alcoholic lesbian heiress's affections. Perhaps much like his former life in New York, Dyar's life in Tangier never becomes a movement toward or away from anything, he only continues to live his "life for life's sake . . . in the meantime you eat" (p. 183), all of which results not only in a darkly intriguing novel, but a highly satisfying existential thriller as well.
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Book Description

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. 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. ( )