(P/B) UNDER THE VOLCANO

Παρουσίαση

Under the Volcano is a masterpiece because the style is, for the most part, uncannily apposite: the novelist has struggled against the odds to create it; he uses it like Theseus uses the thread to find a way back through the dizzying labyrinth, having caught and slain his principal character, that version of himself, the tragic, comic, appalling and endearing Minotaur Geoffrey Firmin. And Lowry knew that in his style he had made something unique and rather wonderful: 'the top level of the book, for all its longueurs, has been by and large so compellingly designed that the reader does not want to take time off to stop and plunge beneath the surface'. The language, with its root system of symbolic connections and counter-references, its symmetries, its constancy of tone, is complete and sufficient in a particular way. 'Is it too much to say that all these chords, struck and resolved, while no reader can possibly apprehend them on first or even fourth reading, consciously, nevertheless vastly contribute unconsciously to the final weight of the book?' It is, probably, rather too much to say; yet Lowry's intention appears to have been to endow his novel with something like a human complexity of consciousness, to make it in effect 'creaturely', with a mind of its own as complex and troubled as that of his principal character. (From the publisher)