Under the Volcano
by Malcolm Lowry
Summary
On the Day of the Dead in November 1938, in the fictional Mexican town of Quauhnahuac, Geoffrey Firmin, a former British consul stripped of his post and drinking himself toward death, spends what becomes the last day of his life. His estranged wife Yvonne has just returned, hoping against the evidence of years to save their marriage, and his half brother Hugh, a journalist freshly back from covering the Spanish Civil War, arrives at the same time, carrying his own guilt over an old affair with Yvonne. Lowry follows the three of them, along with the Consul's friend Jacques Laruelle, through a single day of bullfights, cantinas, and a bus trip that ends with the group finding a dying man by the roadside whom none of them can actually help, each scene circling closer to a confrontation none of the characters quite manage to have honestly. Firmin drinks through nearly the entire day, moving from mescal to worse, and by nightfall stumbles into a rough cantina called the Farolito, where a group of local fascist sympathizers he has provoked accuse him of being a spy. They beat him, shoot him, and throw his body into a ravine, and in the novel's closing pages a dead dog is thrown in after him, the last image Lowry leaves a reader with before the book's opening chapter, set a year later and already read by that point, can circle back to explain what the town has by then mostly forgotten.
Lowry structures the novel around twelve chapters that echo the twelve hours of the day and the twelve months of the year, packing each one with allusion, drunken hallucination, and prose that shifts without warning between clear narration and Firmin's own dissolving consciousness. It reads slowly and demands real concentration, closer to poetry in its density than to a conventional tragedy, and even admirers of the book generally agree that its difficulty is not an accident but the entire method by which it reproduces what a mind coming apart from alcohol actually feels like from inside.
Lowry rewrote the novel repeatedly with his wife Margerie Bonner at their squatter's shack in British Columbia, saving the manuscript when a 1944 fire destroyed the shack and other work in progress, and the finished book was rejected repeatedly before Reynal and Hitchcock in New York and Jonathan Cape in London both agreed to publish it in 1947. Lowry defended the manuscript against a Cape reader's proposed cuts in a lengthy, now famous letter explaining the book's structure chapter by chapter, and Cape published it largely unchanged.
Historical Context & Significance
Lowry was British by birth, which placed Under the Volcano outside the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction despite its American co publication by Reynal and Hitchcock in 1947. The 1948 prize went to James Michener's Tales of the South Pacific, a linked story collection about the same world war that hovers at the edges of Lowry's novel.
Reviews on publication were mixed and thoughtful rather than dismissive. R. W. Flint called it one of the most readable novels to appear since the war while still finding fault with what he termed its second handedness, a criticism aimed at Lowry's heavy use of literary allusion. The novel was out of print by the time Lowry died in 1957, and its reputation was rebuilt almost entirely through later critical attention; the Modern Library ranked it eleventh on its 1998 list of the century's hundred best English language novels, and John Huston's 1984 film adaptation, with Albert Finney as Firmin, earned two Academy Award nominations.