Under the Volcano

I recently finished Malcolm Lowry’s 1947 classic Under the Volcano. Present on the Modern Library’s 100 best English-language novels list, as well as Time Magazine and Le Monde’s corresponding ones, to say the book had pedigree would be something of an understatement. But did it live up to my romantic expectations of Joycean grandeur or was it the self-indulgent, muddled garbage one might expect of its sot writer? The answer, rather predictably, is more the former than the latter.

For when reading a book of modernist bent, with the lofty aspirations that its author had for it, you expect a degree of difficulty in its comprehension – so that was no problem for me. Ulysses was no cakewalk, after all. In fact, if anything, when you finish one of these books, their trickiness can actually counter-intuitively add to your satisfaction, just as I find with indie films. You almost feel relief when it’s over. I for one don’t always read novels for cheap thrills anyway; the more immediate TV and film have taken over that mantle in my life. What I look for in these sorts of books (without wishing to sound as pretentious as I am sounding) is a real insight into the human condition. And Lowry’s magnum opus definitely provided me with that. It stays with you long after you have stopped reading.

Set in Quahnahuac (Cuernavaca), Mexico, and recounting the last day of ex-British Consul Geoffrey Firmin’s life – fittingly Mexican national holiday, The Day of the Dead, 1939 – the novel has a fixed, strict structure. Each one of its twelve chapters tells the story from the point of view of one of the four main characters and represents roughly one hour. However, the narrative is never straightforward; it is marked by what Michael Schmidt’s introduction refers to as “elaborate time-schemes, switch-backs and gradual accretions of information”. This is admittedly confusing at the start (and end!) but really adds to the total immersion in the lives of the characters; Geoffrey’s psychotic, alcohol-soused solipsism is particularly affecting. And depressing. With Geoffrey already beyond redemption, his younger half-brother, Hugh, and estranged wife Yvonne look on helplessly, the Spanish Civil War raging and the world poised on the verge of WW2.

A Diego Rivera mural from Cortez Palace, Cuernavaca

One of the sources of great enjoyment when reading the novel is Lowry’s bravura prose, his “strained high baroque”. You really get the impression that it couldn’t have been written any other way, which is really the point of style, after all. So dense it rewards – or even necessitates – repeated re-readings, the novel has much to say about Man’s complicity in his fate, love, self-destruction and living abroad. Its tragedy is a real one, poignantly auto-biographical given what we know about the author’s own life. Read it and appreciate a neglected classic; you’ll just never want to drink mescal or tequila ever again.

For those of you who won't ever read it, there is a Hollywood adaptation starring Albert Finney and directed by John Huston: