Under the Volcano

"There was a syndrome in the 1920s and 30s of British writers writing about Mexico – Lawrence, Waugh, Huxley, Greene. But Malcolm Lowry was one of the few English writers who actually spent quite a lot of time in the country. Graham Greene was only there for five weeks or so before writing his novel, but Lowry got under the skin of Mexico in a way that few of his contemporaries did. I think it was the lure of the exotic and the unknown, of a different value system. Lawrence, for instance, was very taken by the idea of the ‘savage gods’. Mexico provided all that and was relatively easy to get to from the States. Lowry was attracted by the fatalism of Mexico, exacerbated by the huge quantities of alcohol he consumed. His main character, who was heavily autobiographical, is the Consul, a glorious wreck of a man trying to stitch himself together. It is a day in his life, or, rather, death, under the shadow of a volcano in a small Mexican town. His wife of the time, Jan Gabrial, published her own memoirs 50 or so years later about their turbulent life together, and called her book Inside the Volcano . I like that."

"It’s the harrowing story of the dissolution and demise of an English consul, Geoffrey Firmin, in a small Mexican town on the Day of the Dead. An incredibly moving cautionary tale."