Word: volcano
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Review published his novella, Lunar Caustic which he had first written in 1936. Published in hardback for the first time this year, Lunar Caustic was to be the germ for Lowry's second major novel, the Purgatorio in his trilogy, The Voyage That Never Ends, for which Under the Volcano was to be his Inferno...
Dark As the Grave is perhaps most useful as a new guide to Under the Volcano, more personal data for the cultists, more evidence with which to locate Lowry's favorite cantinas. The novel traces Lowry's return to Mexico with Margerie, just before Under the Volcano was finally accepted for publication. In Dark As the Grave, we meet some of the characters who appeared in different form in Under the Volcano, and we discover the often mundane source of what had seemed brilliant invention in the earlier novel. The Consul's mistranslation of the sign "Evite que sus hijos...
Still, there are a few scenes in Dark As the Grave that recall the control of Under the Volcano and Lunar Caustic, the humor and self-mockery that save Lowry's protagonists in spite of themselves. When the imagery gets a little too mucky even for Lowry's strong-backed readers to bear, he pushes his always tenuous symbolism gently over the edge, and it tumbles to the bottom with the almost comic relief of self-parody...
There are portions of Dark As the Grave that recall Lowry's remarkable ability to capture an emotional moment, honestly and exactly. That ability, crafted and formed with care, made Under the Volcano a great work...
...wonder, especially after reading Dark As the Grave, whether Lowry was in fact just another writer with one fine novel in him. To write Dark As the Grave, he trudged back through the country, the town, and even the buildings that had plagued him into writing Under the Volcano. Through most of the book, Lowry paws around, at times almost dispassionately, in the relics of the earlier novel. What had come off as supra-human desperation in Under the Volcano now emerges as an occasional fit of pique...