The novel gets off to a stow start,' Malcolm Lowry concedes. Is this indeed 'inevitable' and 'necessary'? Many readers find it hard to break into Under the Volcano. Their difficulty is a shadow of the trouble Lowry had in writing it. Like other major novels of its kind - Moby Dick, for instance, and Nostromo (Melville and Conrad meant a great deal to the young Lowry, and both authors struggled hard for those books); likeThe Rainbow, and Thomas Mann's Dr Faustus - it can take several attempts before one really gets going. Readers who have visited the novel's 'terrain' - landscapes, plazas, the very buildings - marvel at the accuracy and miasmic clarity of the evocations but wrestle with the narrative strategies.After three false starts I first read the book through when I was twenty-two, even though I grew up in the very streets that Lowry describes.

...

It is the fiesta Day of Death in Mexico and Geoffrey Firmin-ex-consul, ex-husband, an alcoholic and a ruined man - is living out the last day of his life.

Drowning himself in mescal while his former wife and half-brother look on,powerless to help him, the consul has become an enduring tragic figure. His story, the image of one man's agonized journey towards Calvary, became a prophetic book for a whole generation.

Introduction

Bibliography

Under the Volcano