Malcolm Lowry: A Preface to his Fiction

by Richard K. Cross

This study of Lowry's fiction attempts to show a continuity in his work and that Under the Volcano cannot be seen as an unrelated success

160 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1980

Reviews

[AARON · Rating 3 out of 5]

Chapters 1 and 3 place Under the Volcano within Lowry’s lifelong development, reading his short stories and lesser/posthumous novels as parts of the whole body of his fiction (poetry aside). Chapter 2 is the core of the study, treating both the novel’s “mimetic base” and “symbolic superstructure.” But Cross' analysis offers no summary or orientation to any single work, opting to "follow the contours of the action," charging blearily over themes, symbolic patterns, models, and the novelist's private mythology. It is easy to feel disoriented or to wonder whether there was even any commanding thesis to lose. By the final section there is almost a sense of the author's regret (or exhaustion) at having read every line ever written by and about Lowry. To close on a positive note, Cross’s diligent work left me with some key takeaways: the way he traces the Eridanus theme (“from death to rebirth in an unending cycle”) from Ultramarine to October Ferry, his claim that Lowry cannot write a character who is not a “pasteboard mask” of himself, his attention to Lowry’s “Shandean” life (lived to furnish material for writing), and his framing of Volcano as the Faustian recollection of M. Laruelle, the film producer who opens the novel.

Table of Contents
1. Voyages of Self-Discovery: The Apprentice Fiction
2. Under the Volcano: A Book of the Dead
3. Forests of Symbols: The Later Works