A novel set in a Mexican town on the Day of the Dead in 1939. Geoffrey Firmin, a former British consul, is drinking his way through the day while his estranged wife Yvonne returns, hoping to rescue their marriage. His half-brother Hugh, a restless idealist, is also present. Moving between memory, hallucination and the bright, threatening landscape of the town below two volcanoes, the book follows one man's struggle with love, guilt and self-destruction. It is rich in symbol and allusion, yet moving at a human level. Widely regarded as Lowry's masterpiece, it is a landmark of modern English fiction.
Quotes
Though tragedy was in the process of becoming unreal and meaningless it seemed one was still permitted to remember the days when an individual life held some value and was not a mere misprint in a communiqué.
And this is how I sometimes think of myself, as a great explorer who has discovered some extraordinary land from which he can never return to give his knowledge to the world: but the name of this land is hell.
There was no mistaking, even in the uncertain light, the hand, half crabbed, half generous, and wholly drunken, of the Consul himself, the Greek e’s, the flying buttresses of d’s, the t’s like lonely wayside crosses save where they crucified an entire word.
The howling pariah dogs, the cocks that herald dawn all night, the drumming, the moaning that will be found later white plumage huddled on telegraph wires in back gardens or fowl roosting in apple trees, the eternal sorrow that never sleeps of great Mexico.