Reading Order
Under the Volcano Reading Order
Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano (1947) is a standalone novel — there is no series and no sequel. Geoffrey Firmin, the British consul in the Mexican town of Quauhnahuac, is drinking himself to death on the Day of the Dead, November 2, 1938, while his estranged wife Yvonne and his half-brother Hugh try to reach him. One of the great novels of the twentieth century and one of the most difficult.
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Under the Volcano
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Under the Volcano
Malcolm Lowry·1947·Standalone novel — Geoffrey Firmin's last day on November 2, 1938; approximately 380 pages; Lowry worked on the novel for over a decade through multiple complete drafts; the twelve chapters correspond to the twelve hours of the day and to the twelve signs of the zodiac; the mezcal, the barrancas, the volcano Popocatépetl, and the shadow of the approaching World War are all simultaneously present in every page
Under the Volcano — Frequently Asked Questions
Is Under the Volcano very difficult to read?
Under the Volcano is widely considered one of the most demanding novels in the English language — Lowry is doing several things at once in almost every sentence: the Consul's drunken consciousness (which distorts and doubles everything), an elaborate symbolism (the volcano, the barranca, the garden, the Day of the Dead), literary allusions to Marlowe, Dante, Blake, and the Cabbala, and a temporal structure in which the present action is constantly interrupted by the Consul's memories and hallucinations. The first chapter (set a year after the main action) and the last two or three chapters are the most difficult; many readers find the middle section more accessible. Reading a guide alongside it — Sherrill Grace's Swinging the Maelstrom (1986) is the standard companion — is not cheating; it's what Lowry expected.
What does 'Under the Volcano' mean?
The volcano in the title is Popocatépetl, the active volcano visible from Cuernavaca (Lowry's model for Quauhnahuac) in the state of Morelos, Mexico. Under the Volcano means living in the shadow of catastrophe — the catastrophe that the volcano embodies is simultaneously personal (the Consul's alcoholic self-destruction), political (the Spanish Civil War, the approaching World War Two, the fascism that will kill the novel's characters), and cosmic (the fall from the garden, the damnation that the Consul half-believes in). The novel's epigraph from Goethe — 'Whosoever unceasingly strives upward... him can we save' — is both the Consul's aspiration and, by its ironic placement before a novel about downward descent, his condemnation.
Is Under the Volcano related to Lowry's own life?
Under the Volcano is almost entirely autobiographical. Lowry was an alcoholic throughout his adult life; he lived in Cuernavaca in 1936–1937 with his first wife Jan Gabrial (the model for Yvonne), whose departure from Mexico became the separation that the novel dramatizes; his half-brother Stuart Lowry is the model for Hugh. Lowry wrote the novel over more than ten years, through at least seven complete drafts, during periods of extraordinary self-destruction — in British Columbia shacks, in New York, in France. The Consul's self-awareness about his own alcoholism — his lucidity about the mechanism of his destruction and his inability to escape it — is Lowry's own, and one of the most devastating aspects of the novel.
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