The distractions of each station-stop became intertwined with the awesome experience of discovering Malcolm Lowry. By the mid-point I was entirely under Lowry's spell. Even from the first deliberately subdued chapters, I found the novel completely engrossing. I began Under the Volcano as the train left the quiet, modern city of San Luis Potosi, read through the night, and finished it just outside of Nuevo Laredo.

If you could get by the first two hundred, you were fine. Others, less sympathetic to Lowry, generally argued that the novel was 'uneven.' The first two hundred pages were deadly slow, they told me only in the last chapters did things really begin to move. It had changed their lives, and that was that. The Lowry cultists could not discuss the novel intelligently. Hadn't Malcolm got that one just right, and now I know exactly how he felt, and drunk too! even though Lowry had lived in Mexico thirty years ago when nothing could possibly have been the same, when the chasm between the tourist and the environment must have been immensely easier to bridge. They had visited all the places in the book. They talked of Malcolm and Margerie, rather than Lowry and his wife. And, too, there was something irksomely cultish about the Lowry fans I had met. I had been putting off reading Lowry's novel, partly because it was 'about Mexico,' and could be found prominently displayed on the paperback racks in all the Sanborn's in Mexico City. Towards the end of the trip, as your back begins to stick to the disintegrating leather of the old upright seats, the sunrise lights up the outskirts of the miserable border town of Nuevo Laredo, sweltering colorlessly in the semi-desert of Northern Mexico. Mexican women with three children and a rooster buy one ticket, and then, once on the train, let their charges squirm their way over into the seat that you, God damn it, paid full fare for.Īt every station, sixty people from your overcrowded car elbow their way off, and another seventy push in from the station to get on. The trip, particularly in the second class compartment, easily beats a coast-to-coast Greyhound for discomfort. I first read Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano on the all-night train trip from Central Mexico to the U.S.

Under the volcano by malcolm lowry