Book Review | A City Dreaming by Daniel Polansky

M is a drifter with a sharp tongue, few scruples, and limited magical ability, who would prefer drinking artisanal beer to involving himself in the politics of the city. Alas, in the infinite nexus of the universe which is New York, trouble is a hard thing to avoid, and now a rivalry between the city's two queens threatens to make the Big Apple go the way of Atlantis. To stop it, M will have to call in every favor, waste every charm, and blow every spell he's ever acquired - he might even have to get out of bed before noon.

Enter a world of wall street wolves, slumming scenesters, desperate artists, drug-induced divinities, pocket steam-punk universes, and hipster zombies. Because the city never sleeps, but is always dreaming.

***

He gave grimdark fantasy a knee in the rear with the wickedly witty Low Town trilogy. He tackled epic fantasy to tremendous effect across Those Above and Those Below. Now, as he turns his attention to urban fantasy by way of his brilliantly bold new book, one wonders: can Daniel Polansky no wrong?

That remains to be seen, I suppose, but he's certainly never done anything as resoundingly right as A City Dreaming. An assemblage of loosely-connected vignettes as opposed to a work of longform fiction—although it's also that, at the last—A City Dreaming takes some getting into, but once you're in, it's a win-win. Hand on heart, I haven't read anything like it in my life.

The first couple of chapters serve to introduce M, a rogueish reprobate who straddles "the line between curmudgeonly cute and outright prickish" (p.246) and can do magic, as it happens. "It would help if you did not think of it as magic," however, as our "incandescently arrogant" (p.149) narrator notes:

M had certainly long since ceased to do so. He thought of it as being in good with the Management, like a regular at a neighborhood bar. You come to a place long enough, talk up the chick behind the counter, after a while she'll look the other way if you have a smoke inside, let you run up your tab, maybe even send over some free nuts on occasion. Magic was like that, except the bar was existence and the laws being bent regarded thermodynamics and weak nuclear force. (p.1)

When M is finally called upon to pay the tab that he's run up (and up and up) in the pub that is the entirety of Paris, he decides, after some serious soul-searching over several such snacks, that "it might be time to toddle off" (p.6) to his old stomping ground in the States, because he believes he's been gone for long enough that the many enemies he made there have probably forgotten him.

He's wrong on that count, of course. But M's enemies aren't his most immediate problem. On the contrary, his most immediate problem, as he sees it, is how popular he seems to be.

Book Review | Those Below by Daniel Polansky

For centuries beyond counting, humanity has served the Others, god-like Eternals who rule from their cloud-capped mountain-city, building a civilization of unimaginable beauty and unchecked viciousness. But all that is about to change.

Bas Alyates, grizzled general of a thousand battles, has assembled a vast army with which to contend with the might of Those Above. Eudokia, Machiavellian matriarch and the power behind the Empty Throne, travels to the Roost, nominally to play peacemaker... but in fact to inspire the human population toward revolt. Deep in the dark byways of the mountain's lower tiers, the urchin Pyre leads a band of fanatical revolutionaries in acts of terrorism against their inhuman oppressors. 

Against them, Calla, handmaiden of the Eternals' king, fights desperately to stave off the rising tide of violence which threatens to destroy her beloved city.

***

The conflict between the privileged and the impoverished comes to a hell of a head in the concluding volume of Daniel Polansky's deterministic duology: an inconceivably bleak book about the inevitable effects of generations of oppression that makes the most of the fastidious foundation laid in the flat first half of The Empty Throne as a whole.

Happily, because the bulk of the busywork is behind us, Those Below is a far more satisfying work of fantasy than Those Above. Its world of bird-beings and the human beasts bound to them has been built, the backstories of its expansive cast of characters established, and as regards its narrative, all the pieces of Polansky's game are plainly in play. Be that as it may, some rearranging remains...

A handful of years have passed since the Aubade overpowered the previous Prime in single combat. Now, Calla's meditative master really does rule the Roost—the highest rung of the hollowed-out mountain Those Above call home—but his people are still struggling to accept that the Aelerian Commonwealth, under the Revered Mother and her infamous man-at-arms Bas, represents a real threat.

As one of the Eternal's pet people puts it to Pyre, a misbegotten boy become a symbol of the unrest rising from among the lower rungs, "the mote of grime you scrub from your eye in the morning is of more concern to you than you and all your people are to them." (p.126) The absolute arrogance of the Eternal could be their ultimate undoing, to be sure; equally, their unequivocal conviction that they are "superior in every fashion that one creature might be to another" (ibid.) could be something of a saving grace at the end of the day. Who can say?

One way or the other, war is coming.

Book Review | Those Above by Daniel Polansky

They enslaved humanity three thousand years ago. Tall, strong, perfect, superhuman and near immortal, they rule from their glittering palaces in the eternal city in the centre of the world. They are called Those Above by their subjects. They enforce their will with fire and sword.

Twenty five years ago mankind mustered an army and rose up against them, only to be slaughtered in a terrible battle. Hope died that day, but hatred survived...

Now, whispers of another revolt are beginning to stir in the hearts of the oppressed: a woman, widowed in the war, who has dedicated her life to revenge; the general, the only man to ever defeat one of Those Above in single combat, summoned forth to raise a new legion; and a boy killer who rises from the gutter to lead an uprising in the capital.

***

They say money makes the world go round, and maybe it does—but for who? For me and for you, or only the few?

According to Oxfam, the wealthiest one percent of the people on planet Earth now have more moolah than the rest of the population put together. Redistributing said wealth would certainly solve a lot of problems; it would save a lot of lives, and set right a lot of wrongs. Sadly, it simply isn't in the one percent's interests to do what needs doing, basically because it would make money meaningless, and money is what gives the the moneyed meaning.

The bottom line is that to have haves, you have to have have-nots. Just as darkness makes daylight distinct, and summer would be insignificant without winter, the poor are a prerequisite of the existence of the rich, thus the latter need to keep the former at their feet—financially in the first instance, and factually in Daniel Polansky's devastating new duology.

Those Above, or else the Eternal, are the one percent of this manifestly metaphorical milieu, and they make their eminence altogether evident by literally lording it over the impoverished populace of the lower rungs of the Roost:

Since the Founding, when Those Above had forsworn the wandering of their ancestors to create and populate the Roost, to leave the summit of the City was considered, if not quite blasphemous, at the very least extremely distasteful. The Eternal lived in the sky, or as close to it as they could reach, and in general left the First Rung only to make war. (p.165)

The advantages of living on First Rung are near enough numberless. There, Those Above—and the few mere mortals who wait on them without question—are tended to with an excess of tenderness. Every meal is a feast, medical care means most mortal wounds are mere inconveniences, and advances in technologies unknown to Those Below have taken every difficulty out of the day-to-day. Theirs is a world, in a word, of wonder; such wonder that even indentured servants like Calla—one of the overarching narrative's four protagonists—cannot imagine anything eclipsing it.

Guest Post | Daniel Polansky on The Slums of the Shire

If you go down to the woods today, you're sure of a big surprise.

No, really you are! Just bear with me here, folks, and I'll explain why. :P

See, all you need do is swap out the woods aforementioned with a bookstore of your choice, and the surprise - though it was a lovely one for me - with hot-off-the-presses copies of Low Town, or The Straight Razor Cure, which comes out today in the States and on Thursday here in the UK.

Having read and reviewed Daniel Polansky's darkly delicious debut already, here on TSS no less, I would of course steadfastly recommend you do exactly that.

But don't just take it from me... have it from the horse's mouth instead! Here are a few words from Daniel on what Low Town, or The Straight Razor Cure - really whichever title tickles your fancy - is all about:

Occasionally you'll be with a group of people and they'll get to talking about their favorite historical epochs, nostalgic for lives they never led. One person will talk up their childhood love of the Wild West, another reveal a penchant for Victorian England. This last one just has a thing for corsets, but it's better not to call them on it.

When my turn rolls round I take a sip of whatever we're drinking and look at my shoes. “The mid 90's were pretty good,” I say lamely. “Slower internet and everything, but at least we had penicillin.” 

Perhaps it's my being a history buff, but the past sucked. For about a millennium and a half after the fall of the Roman Empire, Europe just seems like a real shit place to reside. Lots of rooting in filth until you die at thirty a half mile from where you born. Nominally the nobles had it better, but still, your fever would have been treated with the application of leaches and your pretty young bride had like a one in two chance of surviving child birth.  

This probably is why I don't understand fantasy—that is to stay that collection of high medieval tropes collected by Tolkien and gleefully reproduced by two generations of descendants. 

Take elves for instance—though perfectly capable of imagining a world where higher intelligence evolved in a species separate from humanity, my powers of make believe fail when positing that the relation between said species would be anything beyond unceasing warfare. Even a cursory glance at human history reveals our collective willingness to commit genocide on fellow homo sapiens—how much quicker would we have been to eradicate a separate species competing for identical resources? If elves existed, our ancestors would have hunted them down to extinction and erected a monument to the accomplishment.  

But I digress.  

Even when nestled comfortably in a quest to kill a dragon or overthrow a dark lord or what have you, strange thoughts plague me. What does the shady side of Gondor look like? How many platinum coins would a dime bag set me back? What is the point of hobbits? They're just short, fat people. People are plenty fat as it is.  

Low Town is sort of my attempt to answer some of those questions (not the last one). It's the story of the Warden, a former intelligence agent and current drug dealer, whose gradual slide into self-destruction is briefly checked by the discovery of a dead body in the neighborhood he runs. An ill-timed bout of conscience rattles the easy cage of venality he's built for himself, and leads him on a collision course with the life he'd left behind. The Warden is a guy trying to survive the next few days, and not particularly squeamish as to what that requires—the sort of person more likely to populate a classic crime novel than to be found stocking the fantasy section of your local Borders (RIP).  

More broadly, Low Town is an attempt to meld the best aspects of noir with a low fantasy setting—a meeting of tastes which I think complement each other nicely. The spare language and fast pace of good noir offers a pleasant counterpoint to the sprawling—one might even say bloated—length of much modern fantasy. On a somewhat broader level, the tendency of fantasy to focus on world shaking events often renders it irrelevant to the average reader, whose life relatively rarely devolves into single combat against vaguely satanic analogs. By contrast, noir is concerned with the individual, with greed and lust, sins all of us can comprehend to some degree. Low Town centers on the conceit that a world with magic wouldn't be altogether different from a world without it. People are still (on the whole) selfish, stupid creatures, focused almost exclusively on the immediate satisfaction of their basic desires, only now some of them can shoot fire out of their hands.   

That's the idea at least. It comes out today (August 16th) in the US and Canada, and on Thursday (August 18th) in the UK and Commonwealth. I hope you check it out and see if I've succeeded, or if I'm just a pretentious clown. Or both.

Thanks to Daniel for that. Lovely bloke. Lovely book, too!

So who's buying a copy?

And by that same token, who isn't, and why ever not?

Book Review | The Straight Razor Cure / Low Town by Daniel Polansky

Buy this book from

Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com /

IndieBound / The Book Depository

In the forgotten back alleys and flophouses that lie in the shadows of Rigus, the finest city of the Thirteen Lands, you will find Low Town. It is an ugly place, and its champion is an ugly man. Disgraced intelligence agent. Forgotten war hero. Independent drug dealer. After a fall from grace five years ago, a man known as the Warden leads a life of crime, addicted to cheap violence and expensive drugs. Every day is a constant hustle to find new customers and protect his turf from low-life competition like Tancred the Harelip and Ling Chi, the enigmatic crime lord of the heathens. 

The Warden's life of drugged iniquity is shaken by his discovery of a murdered child down a dead-end street... setting him on a collision course with the life he left behind. As a former agent with Black House - the secret police - he knows better than anyone that murder in Low Town is an everyday thing, the kind of crime that doesn't get investigated. To protect his home, he will take part in a dangerous game of deception between underworld bosses and the psychotic head of Black House, but the truth is far darker than he imagines. In Low Town, no one can be trusted. 

***

You go to Low Town to score, be it drink or drugs or a whore. You go to Low Town to buy an hour that'll last you a lifetime, in the company of a beautiful woman with pools of night where her eyes should be; for a few ochres, she can be yours. And providing you have the pocket for it, all comers are welcome to sup their troubles away at the Staggering Earl, or in any one of the innumerable other dens of iniquity dotted about Low Town.


Perhaps you're only looking for vials of pixie's breath to feed your habit, or twists of dreamvine to take the edge off a hard day's night. Well sure! Some shady-looking dealer will set you up - for a price. In "the boil on the ass of Rigus that is Low Town, stewing in all its fetid glory," (p.70) everything can be bought, and everything sold. You come to this squalid, impoverished district to score, but you stay at your peril.


Yet Low Town provides. Just as it has provided for a once-was war hero who lived with "mad abandon" (p.129) in the district in his youth. Now, all growed up and nowhere else to go, fallen from such grace as he could have be had as an agent of Black House, the Warden's swapped sides to provide for it in return. His years with the frost firmly behind him, these days he controls the flow of vices in and out from Low Town, and if he's not a bad man, exactly, he's also far from a good one. Then one day the Warden finds the body of a little girl - marked, molested, murdered - and he must decide, once and for all, where his allegiances truly lie.


So begins Daniel Polanski's dirty, filthy, brilliant debut. Indeed, so it continues.


The Straight Razor Cure, known rather less subversively as Low Town in the States, is a phenomenal first novel from a young American author with enough raw talent to make washed-up wretches of us all. It's not a perfect debut - some uneven pacing and the lack of a single, distinct voice blunts the impact of Polansky's noirish fantasy some - but near as damn it, and that's no mean feat.


Unnamed throughout the novel - not that, credit to him, the author makes a thing of this particular mystery - the Warden makes for a fine anti-hero: ugly and largely unvarnished, markedly older than the norm for such characters, capable of terrible things but cognizant of his moral decrepitude. However the Warden does not deserve the shitstorm he's swept up in after he takes ownership of the dead girl's unsolved murder, above and beyond the call of duty - for he has no duty, in truth, and only a little honour. Yet he does this one decent thing, and is made to pay dearly for it.


In such a way Polansky engenders in the reader sympathy for this dithering devil, and it is enough to see one through the hunt at the dark heart of The Straight Razor Cure; the hunt for justice, for a sadistic serial killer and latterly "something loose in Low Town that was spat out from the heart of the void." (p.67) A thing of awful beauty has come to town, you see, leaving the broken bodies of babes in its wake, and the question becomes: who called it here, and why?


Speaking of awful beauty, says the Warden of an ice-cold scryer at the beck and call of Black House, "She would never be called beautiful - there was too much bone where one hoped to find flesh - but she might have sneaked into handsome without the scowl that defaced her finish," (p.151) and I'd assert the very same sentiment of The Straight Razor Cure. Polansky's prose is direct in the mode of Joe Abercrombie, if substantially less terse, but by that same token it is not at all unattractive. To wit:

"Low Town had enjoyed the autumnal pathos, a moment of communal mourning amid the vibrant foliage, but with the mercury falling no one was in any great hurry to leave their houses just to pay sympathy to the family of a little black boy. And anyway, at the rate children were disappearing from Low Town the whole thing had lost its novelty." (pp.255-6)

There are moments of awkwardness here and there, sequences wherein Polansky seems unsure how to go about establishing this thing or that - when it is not the world that trips him up, it is descriptions of the physical characteristics of certain characters - but otherwise the author equips himself remarkably. I had much more fundamental complaints with Scott Lynch's debut, for instance; the same goes for Mark Charan Newton's... even The Blade Itself. With The Straight Razor Cure, Polansky steps straight up to the plate - and with such style!


Whose style that is, exactly, is as yet open to debate. I don't make a habit of making arbitrary comparisons, but add to the three authors already aforementioned in this review the likes of Joe Hill, Tim Lebbon, China Mieville and Jeff Vandermeer... I could go on, too. The Straight Razor Cure reminded me throughout of other - not necessarily better - books, recollecting Perdido Street Station in one marginal aspect as another brought thoughts of The Lies of Locke Lamora. All of which is to say: I don't know that Polansky has as yet come upon his own unique voice. Rather the author draws liberally from the canon of noirish fantasy, appropriating elements from a range of stand-out talents and conjoining them into something almost unrecognisable.


In that last, however, Polansky makes the vast majority of his influences his own. And in any case mine is a minor complaint. Otherwise, The Straight Razor Cure - Low Town to you yanks - seems a darkly sparkling specimen. When one considers that this thrilling murder mystery represents the author's very first flush, its sundry strengths come to far outweigh its fleeting weaknesses. Now that the worldbuilding is done, and the cast of untrustworthy characters established, I can only delight in imagining what Polansky means to do with them next.


The low-down on Low Town, then: it is practically masterful.

***

The Straight Razor Cure / Low Town

by Daniel Polansky

UK Publication: August 2011, Hodder
US Publication: August 2011, Del Rey


Buy this book from

Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com /
IndieBound / The Book Depository

Recommended and Related Reading

Quoth the Scotsman | Daniel Polansky on Decisions

A couple of caveats to bear in mind before we start. Unless otherwise indicated, none of the quotes quoted in the following article are representative of the beliefs of the person in question quoted nor those the person quoting the person in question. Additionally, any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental... or so I'm saying.

In short, Quoth the Scotsman is just a space here on TSS for me to post neat quotes as and when I come across them. Simple. As. That.

***

There's a great deal more than a good read riding on the success, or not, of The Straight Razor Cure - that is to say Low Town, if you're in the States. If it's well received, The Straight Razor Cure will of course serve to launch the career of one Daniel Polansky: a young American author, and a rather talented fellow by my estimation.

Moreover, however, here in the UK Polansky's debut is being positioned as "the launch title of Hodder's revitalised science fiction and fantasy list," so it follows that the publishers aforementioned will be paying close attention to its reception - both by critics and by the book-buying public at large - in the months to come. Whichever way you cut the mustard, a substantial new market for genre authors and a new avenue of speculative entertainment for readers so inclined would be Very Good Thing.

So I'm hoping The Straight Razor Cure does well. Exceedingly well, even - like a good cake. Thus it was with some trepidation that I heard rumblings about the blogosphere that Polansky's novel wasn't all it could have been.

Well, truth be told, what is?

As of the time of this writing I'm about two thirds through The Straight Razor Cure, and if I'm not yet ready to champion Polansky as among the year's most exciting arrivals, that's in large part because I'm wary of making such claims without all the facts in hand. That said, I'm optimistic; it's made for pretty damn fine reading so far. Think the bastard offspring of Mark Charan Newton and Scott Lynch...

Not to give too much away, but I suppose you could say the following exchange - cod-philosophical and winningly self-aware - spoke to me. So I thought I'd do the decent thing and share:

"It's strange, the paths a man finds himself on. In the storybooks everyone's granted some critical moment, when the road forks and your options are laid out clear in front of you: heroism or villainy. But it's not like that, is it? Decisions follow decisions, each minor in and of itself, made in the heat of the moment or on the dregs of instinct. Then one day you look up and realise that you're stuck, that every muttered answer is a bar in the cage you've built, and the momentum of each choice moves you forward as inexorable as the will of the Firstborn."

"Eloquent, but untrue. I made a decision, once. If the consequences were worse than I had anticipated... that's because it was a bad decision."

"But that's my point, you see. How can you know which choices matter and which choices don't? There are decisions I have made that I regret, that were - that were not who I am. There are decisions I would unmake, were it possible to do so."

Decisions, right? Who would have 'em! :)

The Straight Razor Cure will be published by Hodder in the UK on August 18th. Doubleday, meanwhile, will have Low Town out the door a couple of days earlier in the States, albeit bearing - I think we can all agree - a rather less interesting title.

Expect a full review to hit The Speculative Scotsman well before either date.