There is nothing obscure or surrealist in "Let It Come Down"; the writing is always perfectly lucid, the author always completely in control. Bowles is writing in a well-defined romantic—decadent mode with such a sharp reportorial eye for current realities that his story is fully engaging so long as we can keep from thinking about its philosophic intentions or about the character of the hero.

The metaphysical and imaginative dimensions of the pathological visions are impressive as created by Paul Bowles. They are quite unaccountable in the lay figure Dyar to whom they are attributed and who is totally uninteresting when not under narcosis. Yet it is clear that the action of the novel is intended to be taken as a philosophical and even spiritual quest for "reality" on Dyar's part. There is an uncomfortable suggestion that Dyar's murderous hashish dreams are the only possible equivalents in...