This is by Malcolm Lowry (1909-57), and it was published in 1947.

What a book...



I came across it when Henry Eliot suggested it as a read-along. Because the novel's action is set during the Day of the Dead festival in Mexico (1-2 November), he was proposing reading it in real-time over the course of those two days. (As the novel's key protagonist, Geoffrey Firmin, must be one of literature's most prodigious alcoholics, Eliot also suggested accompanying the reading with a drink-along, but I'm not sure anyone did that...) Anyway, that weekend didn't offer me much reading time, and having tackled the first chapter, I also didn't feel it was the sort of book I could digest in one gulp. So I didn't follow along with the group. But the book promised to be interesting, so I picked it up again when we were living under our own volcano, Etna.



I didn't quite finish it before we left for Malta, but before we'd left Sicily, ie, before the end of January, I'd turned the last e-page. And now here we are in March, and there just hasn't been time to write about it. Why? Because it's one hectic, hectic book... Chris Power refers to "tangled time schemes and a Faulknerian stream of consciousness"; "an extremely dense and allusive prose style"; and a series of recurring motifs that gather extra layers of meaning as the book proceeds. He concludes: "Volcano inspires and absorbs legion interpretations. It can be read as an overtly political, religious, mystical or philosophical novel. It is about damnation, or fascism, or love. It is a tragedy and, at times, a comedy (its flashes of humour are too often ignored). Its metaphors and symbols can be studied and catalogued, but their meanings seem to shift as they recur, or when they are returned to on re-reading. The book refuses to take definitive shape. It is so elaborate that, in a sense, it lives."

There is, indeed, an entire website -- a vast one -- that elucidates the myriad references and allusions the text contains. It's called Under the Volcano: A Hyptertextual Companion; it's hosted by New Zealand's Otago University; and it's both amazingly helpful and totally overwhelming...

So, this is a book that's hard work. You have to pay attention. And when Firmin heads off on one of his alcohol-fuelled inner-world monologues, you feel as though you're launching yourself off a cliff, and will never feel land again. It's the kind of book that you read, and then go back through to make notes on, and then seek commentary on -- and still feel you've only scratched the surface. If anyone does another in-depth read-along, I'd definitely be up for it...

I'm not alone here. According to Ron Boothe, Gabriel Garcia Marquez said this was the novel he had re-read more than any other in his life. For Boothe, it's a masterpiece precisely because it weaves so many layers of interpretative possibility into one narrative: "Lowry himself... described the book as being like a machine composed of lots of moving parts, cogs and wheels and gears... And it is these multiple levels of interpretation, all simultaneously intertwined, that make the book amenable to multiple readings." (Boothe also gamely attempts a chronology, which -- given the way events are revealed out of order through recollections or dialogue -- is a helpful thing to review when you've finished reading.)


The Monument to the Dead by Paul-Albert Bartholome, in Pere Lachaise Cemetery, Paris, inaugurated on 1 November 1899

***

Lowry was born on the Wirral in the UK county of Cheshire. He travelled extensively, working first on a ship headed for East Asia, and after studying at Cambridge, moving to Paris, and then New York. In 1936, he went to Mexico, where his first marriage, to Jan Gabrial, ended (it's this experience that feeds Under the Volcano). His next base was British Columbia, Canada, where he married Margerie Bonner. Herself a writer, but also an excellent editor, she helped him considerably as continued to wrangle the text of Volcano. The couple lived for a while in a fisherman's shack near Vancouver, but eventually returned to Europe (like everyone else, they lived in Taormina for a while, and although Lowry liked the idea of living in the shadow of another volcano, he disliked the town). All in all, it was a tumultuous life. Lowry's drinking went from "prodigious" to "incapacitating"; marital struggles provoked further addictions and mutual domestic violence. His death, in the English village of Ripe, in Sussex, was officially deemed to be by misadventure, but remains mysterious (both suicide and murder have been postulated).


Lowry and his first wife, Jan, in Quauhnahuac, Mexico (the Spanish name is Cuernavaca)


Lowry, outside his shack in Dollarton, Vancouver, 1953

***

The book opens on the Day of the Dead, 1939. This is the time when the souls of those who have died can communicate with the living. There are candlelit processions, and vigils at cemeteries; offerings are made to the departed. It's not exactly mournful, though. The text makes reference to chocolate skulls, skeletons, and funeral wagons, and marzipan coffins. We're told of a child's funeral that is making its way along to the sound of La Cucaracha. But there is definitely an atmosphere... The two characters we meet first are aware of "a remote confused sound -- distinct yet somehow inseparable from the minute murmuring, the tintinnabulation of the mourners -- as of singing, rising and falling, and a steady trampling -- the bangs and cries of the fiesta that had been going on all day". As the Otago site points out: "The combination of sunset, the Day of the Dead and 1939 creates from the outset the atmosphere of a world about to plunge into darkness."


The Day of the Dead

This first chapter situates us in Quauhnahuac. Through the truncated conversations of Jacques Laruelle, a film-maker who is preparing to leave town the following day, and Arturo Diaz Vigil, a doctor, we hear (obliquely) of the events of exactly a year before. Someone who was an alcoholic died then (a time that "seemed already to belong to a different age"), and they're remembering him. Someone had just come back, and they're still surprised that she did. The dead man's half-brother was also there...

As I said, you have to work at this book... As this detailed, if irreverent, summary puts it: "This is still Chapter 1, and we don’t know who any of these people are... [And] there are enough portents and symbolic echoes of death during Laruelle’s wanderings to suggest that any survivors were lucky to get out alive..."

But by the end of this opening section, we know that it is Geoffrey Firmin, the former British Consul, who has died. He and his wife, Yvonne, had separated a year previously, but we learn from "a letter of sorts" (probably never intended for mailing, and fortuitously found in a book that is passed to Laruelle on this, his last night) that the Consul longed for her to come back, and had even vowed to stop drinking. There's also a hint of something concerning the half-brother, Hugh...

We learn that Laruelle and the Consul go back a long way, to a seaside holiday in 1911, when the latter is a "strange little Anglo-Indian orphan". We also learn that Laruelle had a passion for Yvonne, and that he has himself been drinking heavily since the events of a year ago.

There are hints from Laruelle's conversation with Sr Bustamente, the manager of the local cinema, that people were dubious about the Consul's political activities. Hadn't Britain severed diplomatic relations with Mexico...? (They had. It was to do with Mexico’s nationalization of its oil reserves.) Wasn't the Consul, then, more likely to have been a spy...?

That first chapter concludes like this: "Suddenly from outside, a bell spoke out, then ceased abruptly: dolente... dolore! Over the town, in the dark tempestuous night, backwards revolved the luminous wheel."

And then we're back in 1938, and we work our way, chapter by chapter, through the Day of the Dead of the previous year. The return of Yvonne; the bucolic horse-ride that she and Hugh undertake while the Consul sleeps off another alcoholic stupor; the painful visit to Laruelle's house; the trip to the fair; the bus ride to Tomalin to see the bull-throwing (on the way they see a prostrate man, clearly dying); and the final bust-up.



The chapters are variously told from the (close third-person) point of view of the Consul, Yvonne, and Hugh, and the chapter divisions often bring disconcerting but revealing overlaps, where a thought from the end of the previous one mutates into an apparently similar but actually wildly different one in the next.

We soon see how drastically alcoholic Firmin is. To outsiders, he is often in denial. Even to himself, he is often in denial. He is frequently visited by "familiars", either in the shape of animals (pariah dogs follow him everywhere), or of the voices in his head that drive his punctuationless, endlessly circular, internal monologues. Example: "But are you the man to weaken and have a drink at this critical hour Geoffrey Firmin you are not you will fight it have already fought down this temptation have you not you have not then I must remind you did you not last night refuse drink after drink and finally after a nice little sleep even sober up altogether you didn't you did you didn't you did we know afterwards you did you were only drinking enough to correct your tremor a masterly self-control she does not and cannot appreciate!"

There's the occasional weird jerk in the narrative that signals a blackout or other lapse of memory. Or we see Firmin flat out on the street, being helped by a bemused Englishman. Or we're privy to a dialogue only to realize that the interlocutor isn't there, and it's all in his head.

He misses Yvonne terribly, but when she miraculously comes back, he does absolutely everything wrong... He lies about his drinking; he doesn't listen; he almost pushes her towards Laruelle and Hugh.

He thinks to himself: "All your love is the cantinas now..." And that's the trouble. Alcohol has displaced everything and everyone. Which is exactly what Laruelle tells him, when he, Yvonne, and Hugh visit on their way to the fair. Your wife has come back, says Laruelle (who, we saw already in Chapter 1, can't quite understand why) -- and "you treat her indifferently as this, and still continue only to care where the next drink's coming from?" The Consul, self-righteous, cannot answer "this unanswerable and staggering injustice".

He has tried (and cheated on) some weird strychnine treatment, and he makes an attempt to contact a Dr Guzman, who is recommended for dealing with cases like his, but is too drunk to make the call.

But there but by the grace of God go many of us, perhaps. His mother died when he was a child. His father remarried, and then disappeared, leaving Geoffrey with his stepmother and Hugh. Then the stepmother died. And his wife has betrayed him with his childhood friend and with his half-brother... Not easy... And then there's that strange business with the incinerated German offices during the war. Court-martialled, exonerated, then decorated. Hard to know the truth. Does he know the truth any more?



Hugh, meanwhile, is a disappointed dreamer. He's approaching 30, and nothing has quite worked out for him. Not his music. Not his would-be rebellious time as a seaman. Not his passion for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. Not his career in journalism, which is an environment he's quite cynical about. Not his love for Yvonne.

The Consul's ex-wife, who describes herself as "God's loneliest mortal", is a sad case, too. When she married him, at the age of 27, she already had a divorce and a dead baby behind her. Her father was unlucky in business. He tried to make his fortune with pineapples in Hawai'i, but the venture was a failure, yielding nothing but weeds, ruin, and debt. She lost her mother at an early age, and then her father was unlucky again (or is it just inept?). He invents a pipe, in Chile; but the factory burns down. He returns to Ohio where he works in a wire fence company, with the same result: "-- The failure of a wire fence company, the failure, rather less emphatic and final, of one's father's mind, what were these things in the face of God or destiny?" Her father is a drunk, too... Yvonne started working in the movies to help support him. But her Hollywood dreams have not materialized.

She has a vision of how life might be different for her and Geoffrey. Somewhere different, she thinks, between the forest and the sea. Maybe Canada, on a farm somewhere. She tries to talk to Geoffrey about her vision for their life together: "Why don't we go away, now, to-morrow, to-day... what's to stop us?" He seems to agree. There are some words of love. But then he's distracted by something. And he suggests a bar they can go to...


Another volcano of our acquaintance: Mount Mayon, Bicol, Philippines

***

The last time we see the three together, Geoffrey is again touched by memories of his travels with Yvonne, and their marriage, and feels intense regret: "How many bottles since then? In how many glasses, how many bottles had he hidden himself, since then alone?... How indeed could he hope to find himself, to begin again when, somewhere, perhaps, in one of thoe lost or broken bottles, in one of those glasses, lay, forever, the solitary clue to his identity? How could he go back and look now, among the broken glass, under the eternal bars, under the oceans?"

But the mood rapidly turns to custard, and the conversation over dinner is agonizing. It's nicely summed up here: "Communication has never been possible in this book, and with the laughable English in the menu and the clunking language of the tourist folder -- which [Geoffrey] later chooses to quote from as a kind of taunt -- it becomes a bitter joke. Yvonne tries to recapture the brief moment in the [bull-throwing] arena when a future seemed possible, but now, nothing she does or says can convince him. He ends up, in a series of steps Lowry presents as almost scripted from the alcoholic’s guide to shoving away everyone who cares about you, telling Yvonne it’s all a sham. He knows how vile he’s being but, well, that’s how you behave at this stage in the proceedings." Once again, he leaves everyone shellshocked. Once again, he absents himself, flouncing out with the classic melodrama of the drunk: "I love hell. I can't wait to get back there."

Then we're with Yvonne and Hugh, who feel honour-bound to look for him. She feels defeated, wants to get drunk herself. As they blunder through the forest, there's the sound of a pistol shot, which we later realize is the shot that killed the Consul... Oblivious, Yvonne and Hugh carry on. Rain, wind, thunder. Something approaching. A riderless horse. No. 7 branded on its rump (we have seen it already several times in the narrative). It rears above Yvonne. And -- for her, it's over.



Chapter XII (Lowry was sensitive to numerology, and felt this number had particular significance) moves us briefly back in time to the Consul, who has stormed away from the dinner table, and bolted to the Farolito. Another bar, another reverie: "Why am I here, says the silence, what have I done, echoes the emptiness, why have I ruined myself in this wilful mannner, chuckles the money in the till, why have I been brought so low, wheedles the thoroughfare, to which the only answer was -- The square gave him no answer." He imagines the night ahead, even if he stops drinking now. Demonic orchestras, fearful sleep, imaginary people...

The barkeeper gives him the letters Yvonne had written to him (which he has left here at some point, and forgotten about, just as he forgets about so many things). They confirm "his own lostness, his own fruitless selfish ruin". Now he wants to find her, wants to be forgiven. But he finds a girl instead...

Outside is the horse with the No. 7. It's the horse that belonged to the man left dying by the roadside, and it's standing there, all ready to be spooked by the shot the police (or paramilitary, or whatever they really are) fire into the Consul when they accuse him of being a spy, and he proves uncooperative.

You can't get final paragraphs much more chilling than this one: "Suddenly he screamed, and it was as though this scream were being tossed from one tree to another, as its echoes returned, then, as though the trees themselves were crowding nearer, huddled together, closing over him, pitying. Somebody threw a dead dog after him down the ravine."

The last sentence sounds particularly terrible. But the Otago site quotes Lowry himself on this: "The Mexicans believed that in the journey taken by the spirit in the realm of the dead there came a time when a wide river, difficult to cross, was reached. For this reason they killed a dog to accompany his master on the last journey. The spirit of the dog was supposed to reach the far side of the river in advance of the man, and upon seeing his master would jump into the water and help him across."

Let's hope he does. Let's hope he does.



***

I've talked about the story and the characters.

If I wanted my post to go on for screens and screens, there would be so much more to talk about. But briefly:

-- So many omens... Lowry is a master of the boding.
-- I've mentioned symbols. Numbers are important, and more broadly, Lowry was a student of the Jewish Kabbalah.
-- The effect of the narrative -- in case I've not communicated this already -- is hallucinatory. Sam Jordison: "Lowry is forever panning in and out, alighting briefly on one thing, moving off again in a blur, before an object finally resolves before us. It isn't just a matter of point of view either. Reality itself is often fading and clarifying, moving closer and further away." We sometimes don't know if the dialogue is real or just in someone's head, if it's remembered or half-remembered. Not to mention the Consul's actual hallucinations... This aspect of the novel particularly drew attention in France: "The French avant-garde lettrist and situationist writers were so taken with Under the Volcano that they devised various drinking games to mimic the Consul’s nocturnal ramblings. These consciousness-altering adventures, chaotic rejections of the status quo, were later theorised as the 'derive' (drift) and formalised in the practice of psychogeography."
-- There is a distinctly cinematic quality to the style.



***

I'll close with volcanoes: The title actually refers to two, Popocatepetl (still active) and Iztaccihuatl (dormant). Both loom over the town of Quauhnahuac. "The volcanoes! How sentimental one could become about them!" Yvonne thinks. And yes, we lived under a volcano in Yogya, and we regarded it as a kind of friend, even though we knew very well how destructive it could be. Their beauty is noted. But there are also plenty of references to the size and power of these scary neighbours: "There was something baleful now about the evening... The volcanoes seemed terrifying in the wild sunset." "Precipitous" and "towering" are words that recur.

And they're mood-enhancers for the story: Storm clouds gather behind them; a wide blue ocean stretches beyond them; there are "heights where even now at mid-morning the howling snow would whip the face". And as the Consul dies, there is "this noise of foisting lava in his ears, horribly, it was in eruption, yet no, it wasn't the volcano, the world itself was bursting, bursting into black spouts of villages catapulted into space, with himself falling through it all..."

Aye, it's powerful stuff...


RIP, Malcolm Lowry