Lowry himself, a refugee from the London district Fitzrovia of his contemporary George Orwell and the young Dylan Thomas, described Under the Volcano as “a prophecy, a political warning, a cryptogram, a preposterous movie, and a writing on the wall.” At the back of his mind, he was inspired by Melville ( No 17 in this series) and the capacious majesty of Moby-Dick. It was then, we discover, that Geoffrey Firmin – the former British consul, ex-husband of Yvonne, a rampant alcoholic and also a ruined man – embarked on his via crucis, an agonized passage through a fateful day, that would end in Firmin’s killing. Two men in white flannels, one a film-maker, are looking back to last year’s fiesta. It is November 1939, the Day of the Dead in Quauhnahuac, Mexico. This is life!” - Malcolm Lowry The 100 best novels: No 68 – Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry (1947)īy Robert McCrumb, Published in The Guardian Drink all morning, they said to him, drink all day.
“Far above him a few white clouds were racing windily after a pale gibbous moon. Autobiographical and reflective of the expatriated trust-funder in a futile search for an artistic home, the perpetually inebriated master got lost along the road toward his own abyss, and died under suspicious circumstances, out-of-print. Malcolm Lowry’s 1947 masterpiece Under the Volcano, about the fervid last hours of an alcoholic ex-diplomat in Mexico, is set to the drumbeat of coming internal and external conflict.
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