Malcolm Lowry's masterpiece opens a year after the novel's central figure, defrocked British consul Geoffrey Firmin, has died, as an erstwhile friend finds a letter that has fallen from a book of Elizabethan plays the consul had once loaned him.
In this letter, with its signature "Greek e's, flying buttresses of d's, the t's like lonely wayside crosses save where they crucified an entire word", the alcoholic consul writes to his estranged American wife, Yvonne: "And this is how I sometimes think of myself, as a great explorer who has discovered some extraordinary land from which he can never return to give his knowledge to the world: but the name of this land is hell. It is not Mexico of course but in the heart."
I discovered what remains for me the greatest English novel of the 20th century as an undergraduate, shortly after I had relocated to the States where, 40 years earlier in 1947, the book had become an immediate bestseller. Ten years in the making, it received scant notice in England and was out of print in both countries by the time Lowry died in 1957. From the very first page, I was enraptured by the novel's poetic prose, lush setting and depth. I recognised immediately a kindred spirit: English, literary, eccentric, yet driven by a poetic dæmon to seek out new lands, both internal and external.
Mexico, in the novel, is a land of extremes, mirroring the extreme states of mind through which Firmin plunges on his last day on Earth, Mexico's Day of the Dead, 1938. On the one hand, there are the seemingly ubiquitous pariah dogs that follow the consul on his meanderings through Quauhnahuac, the name Lowry gives to the city of Cuernavaca, accompanied by murderous Fascist thugs who prove his ultimate undoing. On the other, there are the small acts of kindness the consul experiences, as when Mexican children gather up and return all his belongings, fallen from his pockets during an ill-advised ride on a Ferris Wheel.
The book has become one I turn to time and again in my own extreme states of mind, opening it at random to inevitably find in its dense, rich prose a contemplation similar to my own. I turned recently to a passage about a bullfight, and Yvonne's – contra Hemingway – description of it:
Yes, it struck her now that this whole business of the bull was like a life; the important birth, the fair chance, the tentative, then assured, then half-despairing circulations of the ring, an obstacle negotiated - a feat improperly recognised - boredom, resignation, collapse: then another, more convulsive birth...the circumspect endeavours to obtain one's bearings in a world now frankly hostile...followed by disaster, capitulation, disintegration ...
No, it is none too cheery. But how often does life seem just so, to those of us past a certain age! It is indeed a book for "deep readers", as Lowry described it in a letter to his editor. But it seems to me that the reason it has never quite caught on with the English literati is, quite simply, that they see too much of themselves in it.
As Lowry's Firmin contemplates: "Accept it; one is a sentimentalist, a muddler, a realist, a dreamer, coward, hero, an Englishman in short, unable to follow out his own metaphors."
• Daniel Myers contributes to Guardian books as Bysshe22
