ARC Review: The Soft Touch, by Daniel Polansky

Book Description

Low Town is the worst slum in the Empire, where lives are sold on the penny. Once its heir apparent, Wren returns after fifteen years to a city in turmoil, the syndicates feuding and the city on the brink of rebellion. Drawn into a tangled web of intrigue and murder, Wren finds himself the pawn in a conspiracy threatening to drive the Empire to war.

But all is not as it seems. Because Wren was trained by the most brilliant crime lord that ever lived—and he’s come back to Low Town to find him.

The Soft Touch: A Low Town novella by Daniel Polansky – Grimdark Magazine

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My Review

I was sent an ARC of this book after I signed up on the GdM newsletter. I haven’t read any of the author’s books before but I liked the sound of it and now I’m intrigued by the Low Town novels. Which I will not be buying because I’m being evicted and I need to stop collecting books for the foreseeable. Once I’ve found somewhere stable to live, I’ll work my way through the collection, and then I’ll buy them. Or at least the first one. I want to know more about the background to this novella.

We meet Wren as he steps off the boat and into the Low Town. He’s clearly on a mission and affecting a rather insouciant air about the whole thing. At the same time, a very important peace treaty is being negotiated. Someone is trying to stop that treaty and Wren has a job to do, preferably without getting his coat dirty. Picking up a young assistant, picking fights with various gangs, and upsetting the secret police are just the start of things. Wren is looking for his father, who is supposed to be dead.

It’s a mystery and I loved every second of it.

There will be spoilers from here. Skip two paragraphs if you don’t want to know.

Wren is a pain in the arse to all the wrong people and charming, although it’s superficial – just to get what he needs – as he takes control of the Low Town, deals with gangsters and Black House effectively, and stops a violent uprising. He’s a cynical, violent man, who really doesn’t want to be. He hates killing, although he’s able to end lives easily, and he has a secret no one else knows, a skill he uses subtly. I don’t think it’s supposed to be a surprise to the reader when he uses his magic to defeat Katarina, since all the hints are obvious, but the magic he does is small magic, building up to his easy defeat of the Academy trained mage.

What was a surprise was the conspiracy he takes apart, I wasn’t ever sure who was doing what and why Wren was involved, until it all came together in Uncle’s office in Black House. That was a marvellous reveal.

Spoilers end here.

The setting is extremely well realised. Obviously, the author has written in this world a lot, so he is familiar with it. I’m not, and that could have been difficult, but the novella doesn’t assume previous readers, and describes the city and wider world in enough detail to understand events.

The complex politics going on around the main character, how the machinations of those with power affect those without power and how people are influenced by propaganda are explored in this novella, almost incidentally to the made plot. It’s very well done.

The Low Town makes me think of an seventeenth century London, with magic. The High Line, that connects workers to the upper reaches of society reads as though someone has dropped a maglev train into a medieval city on a hill. It is a good description of what happens when you put a major road through long-established communities that then become left behind and separated.

The secret police, Black House, is very reminiscent of so many real-world organisations, with paid informants, junior officers fighting for position willing to stab each other in the eye, and a tough leader at the top. There have been so many of those, all over the world. They usually aren’t a good thing. Think of all those killed/had their lives ruined by the FBI or the Stasi on the rumour of dissent.

The main characters, other than Wren, are Geraldine, the young person who somehow becomes Wren’s assistant, and Katarina, the Black House operative that he works with. These women are intelligent, ambitious and street smart. And violent. I found them fun to read, and their motives are not clear, although Geraldine’s growing loyalty to Wren is subtle enough that the ending isn’t that surprising but there’s still some question of where she’ll jump in the final confrontation.

The perspective of the novella is generally close 3rd person present, with Wren being the POV character, but sometimes other perspectives come in, and we never see Wren’s plans or motivations, beyond finding his father, the Warden. The writing is easy to read and I could follow events fairly well. The dislocation between perspectives – jumping from Wren in one situation to Katarina in another, for example – is used well and makes sense in context, especially when Wren turns up immediately after. It’s as though he’s actually been observing events, but the reader and the observed people don’t know he’s there.

In summary, this is an accomplished novella by an experienced writer. The world is dark, gritty, and quite realistic. The title is a hint of what’s to come and when you’ve finished the novella makes total sense.

Highly recommended.