Under the Volcano

by Malcolm Lowry, with Introduction by Stephen Spender. (1947). Printed by Plume Fiction in 1965. 376 pages.

Up to page 48. Reviewed 29 March

This book is the sort of fiction I find most enthralling, where I’m drawn as a reader very deep into the minds of reflective people right in the midst of their daily experiences. The story starts with an evening in the life one M Laruelle, a failed filmmaker living in Quanahuac, a small Mexican town situated between two volcanoes. During this particular evening, he recalls the Consul from Britain, Geoffrey Fermin. As Laruelle gradually drinks himself into a maudlin state of mind, he thinks back on his childhood friendship with Fermin, and summarizes what he knows of the man’s military career, hallmarked by a disturbing act of cruelty against German prisoners of war, which in his darkest moments Fermin admits to have carried out singlehandedly: the prisoners were incinerated in the ship’s boilers.
Clearly this opening section is intended to bracket the subject matter of the latter parts of the book, which will deal with the Consul’s time in Mexico, his broken marriage to a woman named Yvonne, and most importantly with the day of his death. I especially love the way that incidental sounds and occurrences keep penetrating Laruelle’s thinking, because to me as a writer and as a human being one of the most important conflicts in life is the ongoing attempt to find a balance between awareness of the present and reflection on the past: the invisible struggle to weed out distractions while not blinding oneself to the world; the quest for the right chain of mental associations and the endurance necessary to keep hoisting the chain up even as its branchings and tangles become evermore complex and thus weighty.
I very much liked the section that deals with Fermin’s letter to Yvonne, a letter that was never sent, filled with the sort of references to booze and cabbalism made by a man determined to use his own intelligence to destroy himself. I’m less charmed by the part of the second section where a nearby conversation keeps breaking into the scenery with Joycean associations just a little too forced to feel worthy of our attention. Still, I just love reading this book so far and hope the sensation will last.

p 48-121; reviewed 12 April 2008

My favorite part of this book so far has been the section told from the point of view of Geoffrey Fermin as he’s reunited with his wife Yvonne, because it brings together everything that’s horrifying about alcohol intoxication. What’s most horrifying about booze is how much fun it is; how it takes down our internal roadblocks, allows us to treat life as a grand joke, make novel and amusing observations without a moment’s introspection; how it unburdens us from the obligations of identity that are individually so tiny but collectively are capable of pegging us down for a lifetime. In reading the scenes where Geoffrey jokes with his wife, mocks her, struggles not to take another drink and then runs off to a tavern as soon as she gets in the bath, in reading these scenes the impression is of a splendid intellect shattered. Putting the pieces back together is a work of puzzlery for the reader, but because Lowry has made Fermin a full human being, the puzzlery is worthwhile. And Lowry clearly wants us to solve the puzzle, or at least assemble enough pieces that an image beings to form out of the nebula.
In the next chapter, we get a glimpse at Fermin’s rival for Yvonne’s affections: his own half-brother, Hugh, who seems to be plagued by everything that troubles Fermin, but to a lesser degree. A disenchanted journalist, tempted by the romance of throwing his lot in with those who battle against encroaching fascism, Hugh definitely has a trace of his brother’s cynical wit, especially after the first few drinks. But he seems to be protected from going too far with his boozing, protected not by prudence so much as an insulating sense of self-satisfaction. And this smugness, of course, makes him less attractive. It’s never said outright, but Lowry is telling us that Fermin’s alcoholism is a direct result of his brutal honesty and his drive for perfection.
There’s probably always the sense that getting wasted is an act of protest, but this sense must get more and more acute in periods that seem to reek to their core with injustice. Set against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, the rise of fascism in Europe or the ongoing American occupation of Iraq, there must be something liberating in the option of intoxication because when you’re drunk or stoned you at least have the option of becoming a conscious participant in the farcical nature of the plot that unfolds all around you.
As I grow older, intoxication becomes less and less attractive to me. Oftentimes it seems as histrionic and pointless an act of escape as jumping out a high window. But even if you don’t want to participate in such acts of self-destruction, it’s important to go to the scene of the tragedy, to examine the broken glass and traces of blood, both with a forensic eye intent upon discovering what horror might drive a person to such a point, but also with an artist’s eye to reassembling the mind and soul that’s been otherwise irrevocably sacrificed.

pp. 121-230; Reviewed 19 April 2007

It’s interesting to watch people attempt to be at leisure. You’d think that being at leisure would be the easiest thing in the world, but in order to take a holiday you first have to unhook yourself from all the reins and surplices that link you to the driving forces of conflict and ambition. So it is with The Consul, Geoffrey Fermin, and his company as they set off on a day trip to the town of Tomalín in order to see a “bullthrowing” competition. (I’m still not exactly sure what bullthrowing is—it seems to be some lesser variant of bullfighting, which itself is less an escape from struggle than an amplification.)
On the way, the group visits an amusement fair. To the addled brain of the Consul, the fair is less an amusement than a gauntlet of purgatorial tortures: suspended upside down on the roller coaster ride, he feels abandoned by the world and realizes he’s lost himself so much to drink that he’d actually prefer sudden violent death to the endless spiral of inebriation; running in search of a drink, he sees his wife and brother, Hugh, enjoying themselves at a shooting gallery and seems to come away defeated in a competition for being carefree. For months Fermin has pleaded with God for another chance at his marriage to Yvonne. Now Yvonne has returned, and asks only to share a little happiness with Fermin. But the only road to happiness Fermin knows passes through the mouth of a bottle of tequila.
You can’t completely love Fermin, but you can’t help empathizing with the dilemma he’s in. As the day wears on and he keeps sneaking away for a drink, he knows that he’s heading for catastrophe. His wife has come back to him in good faith, but instead of an experience of healing, Fermin seems destined to revisit and repeat the schism that separated them the first time around; only this time he won’t have the excuse of ignorance.
On the other side of the coin we have a long section of the book devoted to the reminiscences of Hugh about his career at sea. As a young man, Hugh played guitar and wrote a handful of silly songs. He pitched his own story to several newspaper editors: he would sign aboard a merchant marine ship and take along his guitar and his prodigious intelligence and he would come back a seasoned poet in the mold of Conrad or Melville. On board the boat, he seems to be tormented by how easy the life is compared to the romanticized version of raw toil he’d had in his head. He returns to London disillusioned and prepared to be annoyed at the instant celebrity that awaits him. Imagine his disappointment to find that in his absence his story has been all but forgotten by the press in his absence.
The nuance of the book lies in the fact that Hugh and Geoffrey find themselves in such a similar predicament: they’re quite fortunate men who nevertheless cannot be happy. But what is a comic predicament for Hugh is a tragic one for Geoffrey the Consul. It seems that Hugh will always be bailed out of his misfortunes, will always have the leisure to look back and pity himself for the fact that he deserved to be a much better man than he became. He will love himself, but the world will never leave him alone. The Consul on the other hand has gone a ways further along the road to ruin, cannot even afford himself the luxury of self-pity because he can no longer recognize who he truly is. Hugh can still play at the shooting gallery while Geoffrey is suspended on a roller coaster whose operator has fallen asleep.

p. 230 to end; reviewed 4 May 2008

I rushed myself to finish reading this book over the weekend, and that may have been a mistake. While the tenth and eleventh chapters are easy to follow, the last chapter reaches a chaotic climax that demands a great deal of time and attention if you want to keep tabs of all that’s going on. The idea is that Geoffrey, after cutting himself off from his wife and half-brother, wanders back to the Farolito, a tavern and brothel which, in his own private reckoning, represents the profoundest personal ruin imaginable. By this point he has long since switched from drinking beer and tequila to mescal, a concoction which gives him visions of being swift witted and entertaining but in truth only makes him uncontrollably cruel to those who seek to love him.
At the Farolito Geoffrey does, indeed, meet his ugly demise at the hands of the same band of thugs that earlier that day attacked an Indian by the roadside whom Geoffrey refused to help. There’s something satisfactory in the way that Geoffrey’s drunken mind equates the thugs with the general thuggishness of all those who would oppress the meek and vulnerable. And there’s a lot of poetic beauty in Geoffrey’s final visions of the world collapsing around him as he dies. But the novel fails for me because we never really get the sense of the bridge between the promising youth Geoffrey once was and the drunken wreck he is now. There’s all the drama of Greek tragedy, but without having a sense of inevitability, the tragedy seems histrionic instead.