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Low Town

by Daniel Polansky
Doubleday. Aug. 2011. 384p. ISBN 9780385534468. $25.95; eISBN 9780385534475. Download: Random Audio.
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Low Town is exactly as it sounds, a scummy place collecting the dregs of the Thirteen Lands and run by a former agent with Black House (the secret police) who's fallen from grace. Now he deals drugs and dispenses violence, but a child's murder gives him pause—and forces him into an uneasy game with both Black House and the underground bosses. Noir fantasy, indeed, with a reading group guide, lots of promotion to mystery, thriller, and fantasy sites, and five foreign rights sales so far.
The protagonist of Polansky's debut, the Warden, is a former cop who deals in drugs and derision. He rules the mean streets of the city not because of great strength but because he possesses more brains than the other street thugs and has a close relationship with the city's wise magician, the Crane. When kids start disappearing, the oft-doped Warden heads deep into the underworld of corrupt cops and criminals to find out why. Sometimes this work reads like a futuristic dystopian novel—the plague only recently leveled the city's population and morality. Most of the time, however, it reads like a confused mixture of past and present, fantasy and detective mystery. There are guns and war in flashbacks. But in the novel's present, most of the fighting is done by hand, with blades and a vague magic.
VERDICT Polansky has not yet mastered the trick of weaving various populations and languages into a cohesive narrative. The result is a sense of disorder and not the good kind that grows out of the postapocalyptic meaninglessness as in Nick Harkaway's The Gone-Away World. Elements of fantasy and pulp fiction don't mix well here, and the dialog often sounds forced. [See Prepub Alert, 2/7/11.]—Stephen Morrow, Ohio Univ., Athens
Reviewed by Stephen Morrow , Mar 01, 2011
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