Product Description

It is the Day of the Dead. The fiesta in full swing. In the shadow of Popocatepeti ragged children beg coins to buy skulls made of chocolate...and the ugly pariah dogs roam the streets. Geoffrey Firmin, HM ex-consul, is drowning himself in liquor and Mescal, while his ex-wife and half brother look on powerless to help him. As the day wears on, it becomes apparent that Geoffrey must die. It is his only escape from a world he cannot understand. UNDER THE VOLCANO is one of the century's great undisputed masterpieces.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #24812 in Books
• Published on: 2000-02-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review

I think I know a good deal about physical suffering. But this is worst of all, to feel your soul dying. I wonder if it is because tonight that my soul has really died that I feel at the moment something like peace...Sometimes I am possessed by a most powerful feeling, a despairing bewildered jealousy which, when deepened by drink, turns into a desire to destroy myself by my own imagination--not at least to be the prey of--ghosts--

Malcolm Lowry's Under The Volcano, first published in 1947, is quite simply one of the great novels of the 20th century. Semi-autobiographical, and taking place during the Mexican festival of the Day of the Dead in 1938, it recounts the last day in the life of the alcoholic ex-consul Geoffrey Firmin. Surrounded by the helpless presences of his ex-wife, his half-brother and acquaintances, he descends into a mescal-soaked purgatory, moving inexorably towards his tragic fate. His self-destructiveness reflects a spiritual struggle born of wilful abnegation and passivity, a depressed, existential acquiescence to the futility of positive action.

The story is simple, its manner of telling decidedly not: Lowry's style is dense, symbolic, allusive, the prose thick with resonance, and the structure complex, with flashbacks, abrupt shifts, and a gradual accumulation of information--it is a book that deserves reading and then rereading, for its pattern and subtleties reveal themselves only slowly. Firmin's story anchors the book's political ambience--the rise of Fascism and the tragedy of the Spanish Civil War lie heavily across its pages, and in turn make of Firmin not a character to be pitied but a representative figure of modernity. In this, Lowry's masterpiece has lost none of its power: it speaks to us of suffering and of loneliness, eliciting our compassion under the century's terrible shadow of mortality. --Burhan Tufail

About the Author
Malcolm Lowry (1909 - 1957) was raised in England and died there but lived much of his troubled life semi-nomadically - in New York, Mexico and British Columbia.

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Customer Reviews

Verbal eruption
I know it's incredibly pretentious, arrogant even, to give the lowest mark to a classic, the `prophetic book for a whole generation', a novel Burgess himself called a masterpiece - or so it says on the jacket. But be warned. Lowry himself conceded that Under The Volcano `gets off to a slow start' (I quote the introduction).

It isn't just a slow start: it never starts. The novel has Geoffrey Firmin, ex-English Consul in a secondary Mexican town, drink himself to perdition on the very day his divorced, sluttish but repentant and benevolent wife comes back to be reunited with him. That is it; there is nothing more. Of course, the best plots are psychological. But Under The Volcano doesn't delve into psychology; it is a manifest, a book about fate, about self-destruction as philosophical act. Thus its dialogues are stylistically indistinguishable from the rest. Its setting, Mexico on the day of the dead, 1938, gets pages of description but fails to relate to the plotline; this might as well happen anywhere. And it is all told a year after the fact, leaving no room for a protagonist's inner struggle. Indeed, my impression is that Under The Volcano's refusal to tell a story in the accepted sense was the very reason for its popularity.

This might still be fine if the writing weren't so confused. Page upon page follows, without a paragraph break, of disjointed text and run-on sentences, forcing the reader to go back again and again to follow the narrative. At times, the novel turns into a patchwork of overlapping monologues, mixing half-backed political and literary expatiation with background noise and the Consul's alcoholic cravings. Accretive writing, I think it has been called. Other authors can be purposely hard to follow: Faulkner, for example, or some Virginia Woolf; but there is a point to their chosen style, which is to mimic the inner voice, to plunge the reader straight into the characters' mental machinery, enabling these characters to tell their tale in a manner that feels raw and real. Lowry's writing achieves no such thing. It is mannered and wooden, an indulgence - the writer's, not the reader's. Art for art's sake. Perhaps, finally, Under The Volcano's textual agglutinations are meant to simulate inebriation. I know easier ways to remind myself what inebriation feels like. Oh well, I guess I am just not an intellectual after all!

"I love hell. I can't wait to get back there."
Geoffrey Firmin, the former British consul to Mexico, is a prisoner of alcoholism. A victim of the shakes, he hears voices, talks to people who are not there, and hallucinates, though he is often able to hide the extent of his drinking. "True, he might lie down in the street, but he would never reel." On The Day of the Dead in 1938, his recently divorced wife Yvonne returns to Quauhnahuac, over which two smoking volcanoes loom, to try to persuade him to reconcile.

Coincidentally, Geoffrey's half-brother Hugh, with whom Yvonne apparently had a brief affair, also arrives that day, and the three share quarters, each hoping to recapture the past. When they take the bus to Tomalin to a bull-riding event, they see a wounded peasant dying beside the road, the peasant's horse with the number 7 branded on its rump, a tricky pesado, and a group of vigilantes, all of whom play a role in the climax which follows.

Rich with details, both of the external world of Quauhnahuac and the internal world of Geoffrey, the novel, first published in 1947, reflects Lowry's own experiences as an alcoholic. Geoffrey, a fully-rounded character, knows that he must stop drinking in order to function effectively, but he is unable to function at all without drinking. He both loves and despises Yvonne, wants to leave Mexico but wants to stay, and wants to find peace but creates chaos.

As Lowry reconstructs this one day in Geoffrey's life, the Day of the Dead, the pervasive symbolism adds to the feeling of overpowering doom--the smoking volcanoes ready to erupt, the "hideous pariah dog" that follows Geoffrey and Yvonne to the house, a barranca (chasm) which exists beside the house and which contains a dead dog, an Indian carrying "the weight of the past," vultures in the forest, Yvonne's release of an eagle in a cage, and sudden storms. All add weight and intensity to this powerful story of dissolution.

Despite the depressing subject matter and a frustrating main character who cannot or will not help himself during the novel's four hundred pages, the novel is breath-taking--elegant both in language and construction. Carefully plotted, filled with unique imagery, and enhanced by symbolism which brings it alive on new levels, it overwhelms the reader with its impact and approaches classical tragedy as the inevitable, doom-filled events play out. Though the novel includes peripheral political issues of the day--Mexico's instability and the philosophical conflicts between fascism and socialism--it is primarily a variation on the story of the Garden of Eden and the fall of man--full, rich, dense, and rewarding, despite its pervasive sadness. Mary Whipple

I Advise My Best Friends Never to Read the Volcano
It is my belief that Malcolm Lowry wrote the last chapter of this novel (12) some time before the other chapters (1-11), and my advice is to begin reading the Volcano with the last chapter - (but who am I to give advice? - Lowry himself suggested that this book required twenty readings, and I have read it only a dozen times.) To a "new" reader, it might be best to begin by reading the novel at Chapter Twelve, the end. And another thing: Lowry read this entire monstrosity aloud, mostly to his long-suffering wife and his few friends; every single word of this novel is spoken; so try this and take turns with your guy or gal - eventually, I hope, you will tune-in to the author's voice, and I hope that it is the distinct voice of the book that will carry you through all of its tragic pages. And yet another thing: why not read the Chapters in reverse order? Malcolm Lowry does not care how you approach his novel - he's dead! - and maybe he did not have much talent as a writer, but I feel that Malc has lovingly stuffed the Volcano with so much stuff, that the novel assumes some sort of organic life of its own, with internal organs and the means to travel from A to B, or from B to A, such that one might be inclined to take it for a walk on a leash, if only to frighten the neighbours.
Will this novel still be read 50 or 100 years from now, along with "Heart of Darkness", "Cannery Row" and "Catch-22"?? on an i-thing? - who can tell. I'll be dead by then myself, so I hardly care. This book has so much life in it that it has become a valued friend to me, even when I hate it. It will be inside my box when the flames consume me. "Can one be faithful to Yvonne and the Farolito both?" - you decide, and then send me the answer on a postcard.