Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry's 1947 novel, has received some pretty hefty praise, considered by the Modern Library to be among the best English language novels of the 20th century, and described by one reviewer as 'one of the most powerful and lyrical statements on the human condition'. Set in 1938 in an imaginary mountain village in Mexico overlooked by two towering volcanoes, it is the story of one day in the life (and death) of the alcoholic ex-British consul Geoffrey Firmin. The Consul (and he is usually referred to in the book) has a checkered past, having been a naval officer on board a heavily armed ship disguised as a freighter, which the British used to entrap German submarines. It seems that the captured German officers had been thrown alive into the ship's boilers (one of the first of many references in the book to Hades), and Geoffrey was court-martialed, later exonerated and moved into the consular service in a remote location to get him out of sight.
Geoffrey's wife Yvonne had left for the US a year earlier, and has now come back, hoping to patch up their marriage. She inadvertently arrives during the Mexican celebration of the Day of the Dead. He is cold to her; it turns out she had been unfaithful to him, and for a year has been expressing her remorse in multiple letters, to which he has never responded. On this day he remains very unresponsive, continues to drink heavily, and ultimately dies in a drunken altercation with some apparently corrupt policemen.
Under the Volcano has a progressive theme involving Hades, and at one point we learn that the ancients believed that Tartarus was located under the volcanic Mt. Aetna. Geoffrey likens himself sometimes to Dr. Faustus as well. He is deaf to Yvonne's entreaties, as he was to her plaintive letters (”Surely you must have thought a great deal of us, of what we built together, of how mindlessly we destroyed the structure and the beauty but yet could not destroy the memory of that beauty.") One does not get the sense of anger, but rather of self-absorption and self-destructiveness on the Geoffrey's part.
This book has been praised for dealing with the human condition, by which I think reviewers have meant the way in which it makes the reader consider mortality. On the other hand, it has some weaknesses as a novel. We never really understand what had been happening in the marriage before the breakup; all we know is that Yvonne was unfaithful, and when she comes back a year later Geoffrey is cold and self-absorbed. It's never made clear what it is about his background that led to him being this way. I am a great believer in the dictum 'behavior doesn't occur in a vacuum', in other words, if he is like this now, it seems likely that he may have been like this earlier. Is it possible that Geoffrey's self-absorption and lack of giving, which are manifest during the Day of the Dead, were also present during the marriage, and contributed to its dissolution? The author doesn't give us any hint, and we are asked to accept his behavior at face value.
At the end, Geoffrey, lying shot in the street, remembers graffiti someone has written repeatedly near his house: '“No se puede vivir sin amar.” As it happens, Malcolm Lowry who drank excessively since his teenage years, wrote this book in Mexico, where he had gone to try to patch up his own marriage. Perhaps he, too, was thinking that the real Hades comes from being unable to love-- and to forgive.
