What is Under the Volcano about?

Malcolm Lowry's 1947 novel takes place on a single day — the Mexican Day of the Dead, November 2, 1938 — in the small town of Quauhnahuac (Cuernavaca) in the shadow of the Popocatépetl volcano. Geoffrey Firmin, the British ex-Consul, is drinking himself to death. His estranged wife Yvonne has returned to try to save him. His half-brother Hugh is present, politically engaged and morally serious in ways that implicitly indict Geoffrey. By nightfall, it will end badly. There is no suspense about the direction of travel.

Lowry wrote the novel as a sustained meditation on what it means to choose self-destruction when you could choose otherwise — or might be able to, if you could stop drinking long enough to find out. Geoffrey is a formidable intelligence slowly dissolving his own mind, and the novel's interiority is correspondingly vertiginous. The prose streams through his consciousness at high temperature: hallucinations, literary allusions, guilt, moments of terrible lucidity, more drinking. The Consul knows exactly what he's doing and cannot stop. That combination — self-awareness without self-rescue — is the novel's central horror.

The politics of 1938 — Hitler's rise, the Spanish Civil War, Mexico's revolutionary murals — run through the background, giving Geoffrey's private collapse a larger frame. Lowry implies a parallel between the Consul's chosen destruction and Europe's. Hugh represents the political conscience the Consul abandoned; Yvonne represents the emotional life he won't accept. The volcano looms over everything as symbol so heavy it almost collapses under its own weight, though Lowry just about earns it.

This is one of the most demanding novels in the English language — not in the Joycean sense of being deliberately obscure, but in the sense that Lowry asks you to spend twelve hours inside the mind of a brilliant drunk on the worst day of his life. Readers who find that premise unbearable should skip it. Readers who respond to language at the edge of its capacity, and to fiction that takes addiction seriously as a philosophical state, will find it extraordinary and exhausting in roughly equal measure.