Under the Volcano
Set in Mexico on the Day of the Dead, 1938. Lowry's novel follows a British consul's alcoholic destruction across a single day. The density of symbolism is almost Joycean; the prose is torrential. Modern Library ranked it eleventh. Writers love it because it shows what language can do when it consumes itself completely.
One reader names the exact breaking point: a sentence running a hundred and twenty-four words, at which they closed the book and started over. Inside the Consul's perspective the events dissolve, and readers report never regaining their footing, quitting around page one-fifty. What they leave behind is "so much drinking and rambling" and a cast where "every single character is intensely unsympathetic," so admiration for the prose never converts into caring. Readers reach for Graham Greene's Mexico novels as the clearer alternative, and note that British private crises crowd out any Mexican perspective on Mexico. A suspicion follows: "not a very important book, nor as good a read" as its shelf position implies.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
