Man In Eruption

UNDERTHE VOLCANO (375 pp.)-- Malcolm Lowry--Reynal & Hitchcock ($3).

Few novels of recent years have come into the world with as much intellectual fanfare as Under the Volcano. Poet Stephen Spender calls it "the most interesting novel I have read since Lawrence and Joyce." Critic Alfred Kazin says it "belongs with the most original and creative novels of our time."

Most readers will find it hard to go all the way with such extreme admiration. But they will certainly agree that in its ambitiousness and audacity, Under the Volcano makes the average novel look small and timid. It begins with a simple triangle (two brothers, one woman), around which Author Lowry constructs a huge and complicated interplay of struggle and emotion.

Decadence & Death. English Author Malcolm Lowry, who is 38, spent the better part of the past ten years writing Under the Volcano, while roaming over half the face of the globe as tourist and merchant seaman. The setting of Under the Volcano is chiefly a run-down villa in the Mexican town of Quauhnahuac (presumably modeled on the popular Anglo-American "colony" of Cuernavaca, where Author Lowry once lived). In the villa, matching its decay with his own collapse, lives Geoffrey Firmin, onetime British vice-consul in Quauhnahuac, now a mentally tortured, helpless dipsomaniac. Upon him, one bright morning--just as he is staggering out of a bar, still wearing last night's tuxedo--descends his divorced American wife Yvonne, in a last desperate effort to remake their marriage.

But also present at the villa, en route to Loyalist Spain, is the ex-consul's halfbrother, Hugh, a leftwing, guitar-playing rover who has been in love with Yvonne for years. By nightfall of the same day, Hugh and Yvorme have been drawn together--and the helpless consul is lying dead in a ravine, shot by a gang of Mexican semi-fascist desperadoes who mistake him for his leftist halfbrother.

This is no more than the bare skeleton of Under the Volcano. Its flesh & blood is Author Lowry's attempt to set down the detailed workings of the two brothers' minds--the one strangled by disillusion and alcohol, the other frustrated and disgusted by the shallow halfheartedness of dubious humanitarianism. Interjecting themselves among these struggles are the brothers' tangled feelings for Yvonne, in which love, brotherly loyalty, hope crushed by fatal exhaustion and pessimism add to their already tortured consciences.

Living Land, Deadened Characters. To deal effectively with these matters would be a task comparable to placing the psychological issues of a novel by Dostoevsky in the time-scheme of a novel by James Joyce. Author Lowry tries to go even further--to make the detailed sufferings of his chief characters fit into equally detailed descriptions of the topography and history of the Mexican setting.

These descriptive passages succeed brilliantly. Author Lowry presents the Mexican scene with such vivid lavishness that by the time the reader has reached the end of Under the Volcano there is not an unfamiliar bird, beast or grain of dust. But the method which succeeds so well in regard to landscape is unendurable in regard to the human mind and soul. Author Lowry's psychoanalysis--with its interminable interior monologues and devotion to the tiniest turns of thought--results in a prose so coagulated by indiscriminate introspection that it bogs down like the characters it describes.

As a study of the anguished conditions of the human soul, Under the Volcano never misses a trick. As a study of living human beings, it buries itself under its own eruptions.

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