Word: consulates
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Lowry matches Updike's portrayal of Rabbit Angstrom's wife drunkenly drowning her baby in his scene showing the besotted Consul desperately trying to place a telephone call. The beauty, the wordiness, the luxury and the humor of his prose find expression again and again in sentences such...
...Consul, an inconceivable anguish or horripilating hangover thunderclapping about his skull and accompanied by a protective screen of demons gnattering in his ears, became aware that in the horrid event of his being observed by his neighbors, it could hardly be supposed he was just sauntering down his garden with some innocent horticultural object in view...
...chapters, I found the novel completely engrossing. By the mid-point I was entirely under Lowry's spell. The distractions of each station-stop became intertwined with the awesome experience of discovering Malcolm Lowry. A small pig urinated on my duffle bag, right there in the car. Lowry's Consul awoke from a drunken stupor, trying to focus on the scorpion in front of him, stringing itself to death...
...novel recounts the last day in the life of Geoffrey Firmin, the British Consul in the Mexican town of Quauhnahuac (Cuernavaca). The Consul, a dipsomaniac, has hardly been sober since his wife left him a year before. On the Day of the Dead, 1938, she suddenly returns, but it becomes increasingly clear that there is no way that he can respond to her, no way that he can free himself even for a day from the lure of the quasi-hallucinogenic Mexican drink, mescal. Near the end of the day, the consul stumbles away from his wife into...
Lowry is never completely in control of either his characters or his language. But the intensity and compelling honesty of his prose more than make up for his lapses. He creates only one character, the Consul--the other characters are interesting or relevant only to the extent that they reflect certain aspects of the Consul's personality. Still, that one character, obviously autobiographical, is drawn with such power that the others are rendered almost superfluous. Lowry's portrayal of the Consul's increasing inebriation throughout the day is in itself masterful--his distorted perceptions change subtly with each type...