Under the volcano.

SELDOM HAVE I found a famous novel so distasteful--so overwritten and underrealized--as Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano. (Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude is a close competitor.) One part ravings and rantings of an obnoxious drunkard buttonholing you in a bar with his imaginary greatness hanging like an albatross round his neck; one part sweatily subaltern emulation of Ulysses meant to exhibit greater erudition, vocabulary, literary bravura; and one part staining to ennoble a loathsome yet arrogant case of dipsomania and concomitant destructiveness and self-destructiveness, Under the Volcano is as ponderous, precious, and pretentious as a piece of writing can be. It is a masterpiece for the semi- or pseudo-literate, a cult novel for precocious ephebes, and an agglomeration of every conceivable literary device from symbol to abstruse allusion, from crisscrossing interior monologues to elaborate refrains and incremental repetition, from flashbacks to foreshadowings and grandiose parallels, from cinematic montage to Joycean punning--all, all to no avail.

Well, not quite all. There are some good evocations of Mexican land- and townscapes, of the flora and fauna (including some bestial specimens of the human animal), an authoritative portrayal of every stage of intoxication, and some effective similes and metaphors among many that fail. The book is anything but slapdash: Written first as a short story--which it probably should have remained--it was rewritten several times as a novel with the obsessive tenacity of a megalomaniacal sot who was going to spawn a masterwork if it killed him and all those who cared for and about him. Like many a drunkard, Lowry was an expert deceiver--was already so as a boy at the Leys School, Cambridge, England, where he had the same French master, S. C. Gillard, whom I had some 15 years later. As his biographer, Douglas Day, puts it, "He was . . . somewhat less than brilliant at modern languages--though he did learn enough in Gillard's French class to deceive those who knew even less into believing that he was a natural and accomplished linguist." His French, like his English and other languages in Under the Volcano, is indeed full of holes, but can fool people just as his writing does. Near the beginning of his biography, Day says of Lowry's death from alcohol and barbiturates that it was the suicide of "one of the century's greatest novelists, a man of such awesome talent that the word genius must be used to describe him." Between Lowry and genius, the difference is as between night and Day.

Under the Volcano is, like Ulysses, the chronicle of a day, in this case the last one in the life of Geoffrey Firmin, British ex-consul in Quanhnahuac (the Indian name for Cuernavaca), a confirmed alcoholic with the added excuse that his wife, Yvonne, has left and divorced him. He is being tended by his younger half-brother, Hugh, a journalist fresh from the Spanish Civil War and a mysterious sojourn in Texas, and, once again, by Yvonne, who suddenly, worriedly, lovingly, comes back near the beginning of the novel. The day is November 1, 1938, the Day of the Dead, which, in the Mexico of that era, was celebrated with much boozy revelry and effigies of death cheerfully proliferating. Firmin is overwhelmed by his wife's return, but, for reasons that, like anything else of any importance in this novel, are left unclear, cannot even try to give up the bottle for her. At the end of a day of ever more frantic drunkenness--though the Consul (as he is generally and portentously referred to) supposedly drinks to achieve a drunken lucidity and even clairvoyance--he manages to get himself not undeliberately killed by the fascistic para-police, and to drag Yvonne down with him. Hugh, who had a brief fling with Yvonne, and who loves both her and the Consul with a devotion neither of them deserves, will probably be shattered, too, if he survives a near-suicidal gesture he plans on behalf of the already doomed Spanish Loyalists.

The problem, aside from bad writing, is that the novel sheds no light on why the Consul drinks, why his beautiful and not unintelligent wife adores him despite the odd infidelity she is driven to by his stuporous neglect of her, why Hugh is so full of loving-kindness for this abominable, frequently hostile drunk, and why we should find Firmin worth caring about for 375 attitudinizing pages. All of these difficulties are inherited and faithfully passed on to us by the movie version scripted by young Guy Gallo (a condignly vinous name) and directed by old John Huston. The filmmakers have tried to extract a more followable story line from the novel's tortuous meanderings, and have omitted one major character (the ex-cineaste Jacques Laruelle, a friend and fellow expatriate of Geoff's and former lover of Yvonne's) and conflated some minor ones. They have slightly underplayed the sympathies with Communist Spain and over-elaborated the presence of Nazis and Nazi sympathizers in Mexico, along with Hugh and Geoff's anti-Nazi stand. They have cut out all the (not uninteresting) flashbacks to the characters' younger years, and they have eliminated nearly all the (quite uninteresting) references to Geoff's vast learning and the book about the cabala and related mystical and mythological matters he fancies himself to be working on.

The result is a film that is much more linear, logical, comprehensible than the book, but, alas, even more boring. One of the strengths of the book is its conceivably definitive depiction of a lush in literature, including "this precarious stage, so arduous to maintain, of being drunk in which alone he [the Consul] was sober!" But after the point has been made, endlessly repeated, and worried to death, it becomes, to quote again, "the obscure language known only to major adepts in the Great Brotherhood of Alcohol." Known perhaps to others as well, but of (so to speak) consuming interest only to the GBA. Yet why does this man drink? The novel offers only a few feeble, disingenuous, and misleading hints, the foremost of which is: "Even almost bad poetry is better than life, the muddle of voices might have been saying, as, now, he drank half his drink." In other words, this is yet another of those tiresome works (e.g., Morgan!, King of Hearts, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest) in which craziness, drug addiction, or alcoholism is made out to be braver, truer, finer than sober, sane adherence to an allegedly c corrupt world drained of all decency and nobility. Tendentious rubbish!

I have little doubt that Malcolm Lowry drank out of either repressed homosexuality or an obscure sense of artistic failure, or, most likely, a combination of the two. He bestowed this condition on his semi-autobiographical protagonist who cannot begin to satisfy Yvonne, lovingly restored to him, and who does not do a lick of work on his magnum opus, toward which he has been collecting and reading esoteric tomes all his life. But there is almost no such insight in the novel, and none whatever in the film. The novel tries to redeem Firmin by making him, as Lowry thinks, infinitely witty and charming while still pointing an occasional accusatory finger at him. In the movie, because the interior monologue is excised, the Consul is less witty and charming, for which, however, Albert Finney's supposedly magisterial performance is meant to compensate.

It doesn't. Finney is heavy-handed and obvious, playing the Consul with a bug-eyed, wordless despair, which may be appropriate, but without the lightness, the redemptive finesse, which is mandatory if we are to feel for the character. I don't know whether this performance is too honest or too hammy--given the Consul's besotted outrageousness, it could be either--but Finney forfeits compassion, too high a price even for honesty. The part of Hugh suffers worst in the adaptation, for Hugh represents mostly young Lowry's running away to sea, all of which the script cuts. Anthony Andrews is not the actor to fill in such lacunae, though his face has filled out into a deplorable pudginess. As for Yvonne, although Lowry had two wives to base her on, she emerges as only half a character because, being no part of himself and a woman to boot, she did not exercise his imagination (or, rather, his lack of imagination) much. Jacqueline Bisset manages to look right and to do nothing conspicuously wrong, which, for such a passive role, proves amply sufficient. Among the minor characters, the comic Englishman is done best, by James Villiers, who knows how to wear the old school tie as if it were the Order of the Garter.

Houston's direction is listlessly straight-forward where some inventive quirkiness is sorely needed. Huston does not get in the way of the material, but neither does he lend much of a helping hand. Granted Mexico has changed much in the intervening years (Cuernavaca, for instance, was no longer usable), but why should Popocatepetl--doubtless its old, awesome self--be used so sparingly and unimpressively? Even the book's key line seems to be missing: "Under the volcano! It was not for nothing the ancients had placed Tartarus under Mount Etna . . ." Certainly we miss the interplay between nature, or the characters' conceptions of it, and their lives.

The lush cinematography of that old overstater Gabriel Figueroa does not help. Best remembered as Banuel's Mexican cameraman on such movies as Nazarin, The Exterminating Angel, and Simon of the Desert, Figueroa is a powerful expressionist in black and white; here, in color, he gives us garish images d'Epinal, and contributes a coarse insistency that undercuts the prevailing etiolation and lethargy. Alex North's score is undistinguished, but at least avoids the vulgarity of the title sequence and of the overdone whores and dwarf in the closing Farolito scenes. The film does not even convey the hell in which the main characters are cooking: Rather than Tartarus, it is, at best, steak tartare. Or, more likely, hash.