Under the Volcano (Penguin Modern Classics) [Paperback]

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. n Mary Whipple

It seemed clear to the `best minds of my generation' in the 1950s and 60s that the only philosophically respectable goal in life was to drink yourself to death as resolutely as possible. That the closest we could approach satori, after the Holocaust and Hiroshima, was delirium tremens. Most of our heroes, after all, were holy drunkards: Dylan Thomas, Brendan Behan, Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Hart Crane, Mickey Mantle, Dexter Gordon, Frank Sinatra, John Steinbeck, Jack Kerouac, inter alia. But the holiest drinker of all, the most lucid expounder of the hallicinatory wisdom known only to the falling-down drunk, was a fictional character, the defunct British Consul Geoffrey Firmin in the novel "Under the Vocano" by Malcolm Lowry, a legendary drunkard in his own right. How I survived my youthful idealism is a mystery to me now, in the temperance of my later years; I must have lacked the patience to get righteously blotto day after day.

"Under the Volcano" transpires in a single day, November 2nd 1939, el día de los muertos In Mexico. Roughly twelve hours of that day ... less time than most people will require to read the book. The former British Consul wakes up, as almost always, with a hangover as towering at the nearby Popcatepetl volcano; his entire day will be spent drinking, deciding never to drink again, craving a drink, strategizing how to get just enough of a drink so that he can maintain an illsuion of sobriety. His futile balancing act of lucidity/incoherence will be severely tested, as his divorced wife unexpectedly arrives to rescue/redeem/reclaim him, a quixotic task made more hopeless by the presence of the Consul's younger brother, a leftist journalist supposedly en route to deliver explosves to the desperate Republican armies of Spain, already effectively crushed by Franco in the battle of the Ebro. The brother and the wife have been lovers, though both of them love the Consul with a devotion that survives his most brutal behavior and his hopeless descent into alcoholic dementia.

More than hafl of the novel is `narrated' from within the mind of Geoffry Firmin; the other chapters detour through the minds of the wife and the brother. Geoffry's mind is a realm of wonder, the mind of a genius polymath gone into free-fall. The range of allusions rivals that of "Ulysses" or "Finnegan's Wake", but Malcolm Lowry's great strength is to keep his character's `stream of consciousness' flowing powerfully, emotively, enticingly even if the allusions escape the reader's scope. It doesn't matter when a drunkard's thoughts become unintelligible or inchoate, as long as they remain `human' enough to elicit the reader's empathy. This is, without a doubt, the most convincing portrayal of the state of drunkenness in all literature, a seething tangle of rage, guilt, shame, defiance, free association, abject dissociation, hallucination, ultra-perception, nausea, delirium, and the sudden mirage of sobriety.

But "Under the Volcano" isn't only about drunkenness. It's also about the entwined failure of the relationships of three deeply loving people, whose very effort to love each other crushes each of them in turn. And it's a novel about time and place, on several levels of scale. It's about Mexico at a time of social dissolution and violence not unlike the Mexico of today; then it's about Spain in particular and Europe in general at the time of the rise of fascism and anti-semitism; then it's about the `long duration' of European conquest of the `Indian' cultures of the Americas. These dimensions of time and space expand and contract rhythmically in the narrative, much as Geoffry Firmin's state of intoxication expands and contracts from cogency to comedy.

No, this is NOT a cheerful tale. It's utterly dire, tragic, horrific, excruciating, one of the darkest novels ever composed. Fair enough?

But it is an incredible feat of writing, a novel of the utmost coherence and clarity dredged out of the experiences of drunken irrationality, both personal and societal. The depiction of the horrifying depravity of fascism is as potent and convincing as the depiction of the Consul's self-destruction through alcohol.

There are two levels ... structures? ... of symbolism in the novel that I wasn't a good enough reader to recognize explicitly, decades ago when I first read the book. Insistently, in march step with Geoffry's phases of delirium and coherence, two sorts of images appear, either in the external descriptions of his situation or in his thoughts. The two sorts of images are basically circles and cracks. The circles range in scale from the ring left by a glass on a bar, to circles of dancers in a plaza, to the circle of mountains around Cuernavaca (the real setting of the novel), to the circling planets of teh solar system and the infinite circles of galactic space. Of course! Geoffry's head is spinning, his mind is whirling! The standard image of a drunk "seeing stars" is exploded to cosmic queasy ecstasy. Then the `cracks' appear: in the sidewalk, a fence between neighbors, the borders between states of Mexico, the borders that have to be crossed between countries and warring camps, the hard line of hatred between ideologies, the impassible barriers between individuals even as they seek to `touch' each other, and most visibly, ominously, physically present: the ravine that cuts through the heart of Cuernavaca. Beware of that ravine as you read! Don't mock it recklessly by tottering at its edge, as the Consuls' brother does! Don't think for a moment that you'll somehow cross it with impunity!

So .... "The greatest of all Latin American novels, the archetype of all of them, wasn't written in Spanish but In English, in 1949, by an alcoholic hermit from England who never managed to finish another book." Hey, what credentials do I have for making such an assertion? None. It's pure hyperbole. But I'm sincere in saying that "Under the Volcano" is one of the greatest novels of the 20th Century, an unforgettable reading experience.

While I read this book I was constantly reminded of Joyce's Ulysses. I have never heard of this author before, but I really enjoyed this book and can highly recommend it. In fact, I think this book would be a nice starting point if you want to read Ulysses but think you might not like the structure of it. Both books use "stream of consciousness," both take place during one day, both have two men and a woman as the main focus, both women are "entertainers," and there is a good deal of drinking in both books. If you've already read Ulysses and like the idea of a "Ulysses in Mexico," by all means pick this up. All in all, a much better book than I expected.

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