Under the Volcano (1947)

In 1936, the peripatetic Lowry settled in the resort town of Cuernavaca, some 50 miles south of Mexico City, where he soon began writing his masterpiece, initially as a short story. Under the Volcano would take ten years to revise fully as Lowry added layer upon layer of mythological reference, mystical symbolism and literary allusion. After the first chapter, the novel chronicles the final twelve hours in the life of a British ex-consul in Quauhnahuac, the Indian name for the town of Cuernavaca. Though most frequently focalised through the mind of the Consul, the book presents the story through the eyes of other characters in some chapters, and its first chapter is set exactly one year in the future, after the Consul’s death. The novel develops as a phantasmagoric late modernist tour de force which follows the day-in-the-life approach of Joyce’s Ulysses and Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, but draws on Lowry’s personal interests in Romanticism, expressionism, symbolism and the cabbala. In conventional terms little happens, as the Consul embarks on a drinking spree, while his wife, who has temporarily returned to him, and his brother, who has been fighing in Spain, try to keep him from harm, whether inflicted by himself or by the corrupt Mexican police, who do shoot him at the novel’s close. The book’s fascination lies in its exemplary use of modernist devices: baroque symbolism, rococo imagery, interior monologue, mythological allusion, defamiliarisation, time-shifting, fast-cutting, and intensely resonant, rhythmical, poetic prose. Like Joyce’s Ulysses it is a book about everything: politics, history, Western literature, religion, psychology and human relationships. To this day, the single best way to approach the novel is undoubtedly through Lowry’s 35-page 1946 letter (reprinted in the 1985 Penguin edition) to his British publisher, Jonathan Cape, detailing and defending the book’s dense construction and intricate organisation.