Word: volcanoe
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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...
Dark As the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid may be the last of Lowry's incomplete works to be published, unless Mrs. Lowry squeezes the manuscripts for another "find." And of the lot, Under the Volcano remains the only major testament to Lowry's right to a place among the finest writers of the century. Despite his remarkable talent at self-portrayals, Lowry's power derives almost solely from the infernal torture of one two-year period in his life which he somehow survived. In the end, his contribution may come down simply to the fact that...