• Title: Under the Volcano
• Author: Malcolm Lowry
• Genre/Subject: 20th Century modernist literature
• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication Date: 1947
• Start date: 6/16/25
• Finish date: 7/8/25

Review:

This was so good. A modernist novel that right from its first publication was recognized as a masterpiece. I loved this book and will be referring back to it in the future, often, until people are sick of me banging on about Under the Volcano. With that said, not everyone loves or even admires this novel. My wife has a Masters degree in English but can’t stand this book. In fact when I told her what I was reading she said, “Oh, you have my condolences.” Starting out like that is intimidating, let me tell you. And I admit, as did the author, that the book takes a while to get going. Once it got going however, I couldn’t put it down.

So as I see it, the reason I loved this book and my wife did not is that I am a recovered alcoholic and she is not. So many parts of this book describe things, situations, feelings, and activities that I have personally experienced. Some many times over. Rather than serving as a trigger, reading about these things gave me a huge sense of relief as I am in my tenth year without a drop this year and will never go back. If I had any thoughts about going drinking this book would have cured me of that in the first dozen pages, or less.

So before I get into my review of the book I thought I should give a review of me and why I can relate so intimately with this novel. Being a man of exceptional charm I was born at a very early age… okay not really but that’s funny stuff right there. Let’s begin by winding back the calendar all the way back to 1990 and the world before the internet, iTunes, and Instagram influencers. When 80s music was simply called music and porn was found on old railway sidings rather than on Only Fans. I graduated from high school and on my 18th birthday I went for my first beer. I remember it was an afternoon and my brother-in-law took me to a pub called David’s Lounge. I had a bottle of Labatt’s Blue and then tried dry ribs with a honey-mustard dip for the first time. And then I had another beer and another after that…for the next 25 years. I have never been able to keep a job for more than 3 years and many if not most were over in under a few months or weeks. Why? Drinking, being drunk, being hungover and then drunk again, employers generally frowning on this behavior. Totalled at least two vehicles, was charged with impaired driving and nearly charged with impaired driving countless times. Had no decent relationships as any that I began would be based on a mutual love of alcohol, and that never makes for lasting relationships. In jail, out of jail, never on the wagon for more than a day or two, a few weeks one time but nothing even close to sobriety. No hobbies, no fitness, every day and every dollar was spent in the relentless pursuit of alcohol. One time I slept under a bus bench while waiting for the bus. Another time I was refused service at the liquor store. At 10:01 AM. So suffice it to say I know what drinking and being a drunk is, personally and intimately. Which is why I could relate to the protagonist in Volcano right from the first chapter. For clarity I will precede and close my personal experiences with *an asterisk*.

The protagonist in Under the Volcano is a man named Geoffrey Firmin. Ex-consul, ex-husband, ex-everything. It is the Day of the Dead festival in Quanahuac, Mexico and Geoffrey Firmin is living out the last day of his life drowning in mescal and tequila. And beer, wine, cocktails, whiskey, vodka and anything and everything else. Dawn comes and our hero is sitting in a dingy cantina called the Farolito. Smashed out of his mind his ex-wife walks in to the Farolito and he’s not convinced that he’s not imagining this, that it’s a mescal fueled hallucination. *I woke up in jail once and asked them to release me because I was convinced I was dreaming and the police were by extension not real*

But his ex, Yvonne, was real and is really standing there in the “dusty alcoholic gloom”. And so begins Geoffrey’s day of the dead, after an all night drunk preceded by innumerable all night drunks before that. But somehow Yvonne gets him home to the consular residence with its gone-to-seed gardens and unmade beds, a ruin of former civility. *I had fruit flies once in my apartment so bad after weeks of accumulated beer cans. I was too drunk and weak to do anything more than spray them impotently with Windex as that was all I had in the apartment*

And then, his half-brother Hugh pulls into town after living in Texas for some months. He is suntanned and literally dressed up as a cowboy right down to a gun belt slung low on his hips. While the wife and brother are getting unpacked and settling in our Geoffrey takes a tour of the consular grounds. Or at least until he locates the bottle of tequila stashed under a plantain bush. *I used to have a favorite hedge that served as my emergency-emergency stash. Meaning if my emergency bottle was empty or had been discovered by well meaning persons I could rely on that. Did you know vodka doesn’t freeze until minus 25? I know that.* Anyway, once Geoffrey, often referred to as simply the Consul has got enough alcohol in him to stop shaking he is able to pull himself together enough to (with the help of Hugh) get washed, shaved and into clean clothes. What to do now? Why not take a nice quiet afternoon and sort out the garden? Or take a hot and dusty bus trip to see a bullfight in another town. Yeah that’s a great idea. *When I was in such a state it always seemed to coincide with other people deciding on doing things with me in the heat and endless, unwelcome sunshine.*

The novel progresses like this, in 12 chapters as a sort of journey to Calvary for the Consul. His apostles are Hugh and Yvonne who have to look on, powerless to do anything to help. *Like me. Like fucking me. And my parents, my friends, my ex-wife, doctors, random people at bus stops seeing if I’m dead or sleeping, it was them. I’m Geoffrey. I am Prometheus, bound but never having given the gift of fire to man.*

There I go again. Like I did every page of this extraordinary novel, reading about me, not Geoffrey. Geoffrey is a metaphor for people that have experienced what I have, and those that continue on that road to Calvary, or more accurately to Golgotha. “The Farolito in Parian, how it called to him with its gloomy voices of the night and early dawn.” *The Lion’s Head, The Sawmill, David’s Lounge* “Yvonne’s heart felt suddenly light as that of a boy on his summer holidays, who rises in the morning and disappears into the sun.” *Like Icarus. a boy falling out of the sky*

This book is a tragedy in the true sense of that word, like Greek drama or Waiting fof Godot. Nothing is certain except that things get slowly worse and end in death. I found my way out of a hell of my own devising, the Consul was not as fortunate.

I loved this book, this spoke to me on levels that I didn’t want exposed, that I keep in the alcoholic gloom of my past life. This is what literature does, is supposed to do, is designed to do. Literature challenges us and makes us uncomfortable, it holds up a mirror with fruit flies on it to see our own face which we only recognize as a shadow of our self. And at the end of the book we have finished our own journey. Books do this as nothing else can. A film, no matter how brilliant is filtered through the lens of the director, the actors. Books are hard, they hurt, and they help, but it is a personal journey, unfiltered and raw, like mescal.

The 5 stars that I award don’t even seem enough, that’s how good this book was for me.