As promised, it's time to hit the bottle in this month's Reading group. Has there been a more alcoholic book than Under the Volcano? Sure, there's drinking in Hemingway's Fiesta. Booze causes problems in Tender Is the Night. Charles Bukowski managed a few jars. Jack Kerouac struggled with the DTs in Big Sur. The Long Goodbye starts with the line: "The first time I laid eyes on Terry Lennox he was drunk …" and just about everyone else Philip Marlowe meets is a lush. But Under the Volcano takes things to another level.

Early in September, Reading group contributor Rastignac asked: "I wonder how feasible a drink-along would be for this novel?" I emphasise how early this post came because once you're immersed in the book such a question becomes absurd. It isn't just that the poor Consul drinks enough before breakfast to leave anyone else reeling; alcohol, though it is a source of many funny moments in the book, is no laughing matter. This isn't Withnail and I. No one would want to go on holiday with the Consul. His is an awful, terrible tragedy.

The Consul's story is mainly sad, but it isn't completely simple. There are many layers, meanings and refractions in this fascinating book. Every time the drink is held up, it reflects back a different light. The Consul doesn't simply imbibe because he has become chemically dependent on the alcohol, because it stops his trembling, because it makes him able to face the world, because it helps him forget. He drinks because alcohol is wonderful. It gives him moments of great beauty and truth. It makes him happy. It makes him funny. It makes him eloquent.

Bysshe22 neatly explained these contradictions:

"There's been much jolly talk of drink-alongs and such, but alcohol's effect on the Consul's consciousness is the lens through which … the world the book presents is seen, the light and the dark. What do we think of the paragraph-length passage about 10 pages into the second chapter that begins: "But look here, hang it all, it is not altogether darkness", and continues: "… not even the gates of heaven, opening wide to receive me, could fill me with such celestial complicated and hopeless joy … All mystery, all hope, all disappointment, yes, all disaster, is here. The point here is not so much the splendid writing – and it is almost incredibly splendid – but can we relate to and do we sympathise with the Consul's early morning alcoholic vision? If so, it has always seemed to me that the Consul himself becomes no less than an heroic figure."

I can only answer Bysshe22's question by asking another: how can we not sympathise with the Consul? This is a man who seems able to grasp the marvellous essence of life. He has the same sense of wonder as Cortez in Keats's famous poem. But the Consul doesn't need to be on a peak in Darien to provoke such "wild surmise". He just needs the alchemy of alcohol.

Sure, the Consul is drinking himself to death and his marriage has already been ruined by drink. Then his wife comes back to him, and he destroys his one chance to make things right by continuing to throw back the booze. It's agony to witness. Whenever we see him in the book, we are all too aware that his next drink is just about to go down. We fixate on it as much as he does. And on the rare occasions when he isn't drinking, a great weight is lifted. Those few moments when he pushes a tequila to one side, or even when he only drinks beer (which is, after all, "full of vitamins"), give us huge relief. We are often made to feel like voyeurs, witness to his intimate degradation. There's little fun in seeing the Consul puking, or on his knees in his garden scrabbling after a bottle, or turning into a cantina even though it means he may miss a bus, or finally starting on the mescal, against everyone's better judgement, including his own. We are desperate for him to stop. He is desperate to stop. Everyone who loves him is desperate for him to stop.

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And yet, and yet, there is something noble about his continuation. Something we are prepared to indulge. Late on, we see this: "Oozing alcohol at every pore, the Consul stood at the open door of the Salon Ofelia. How sensible to have had a mescal. How sensible. For it was the right, the sole drink to have had under the circumstances … he was … well able to cope with anything that might come his way."

In spite of everything, I still found myself half agreeing, because there is some kind of logic to his behaviour; he always gains strength from the drink. I knew some good would come of it, as well as bad, and that was before this glorious revelation:

"There were, in fact, rainbows. Though without them the mescal (which Yvonne couldn't of course have noticed) would have already invested the place with a magic. The magic was of Niagara Falls itself, not its elemental majesty, the honeymoon town; in a sweet, tawdry, even hoydenish sense of love that haunted this nostalgic spray-blown spot. But now the mescal struck a discord, then a succession of plaintive discords to which the drifting mists all seemed to be dancing, through the elusive subtleties of ribboned light, among the detached shreds of rainbows floating. It was a phantom dance of souls, baffled by these deceptive blends, yet still seeking permanence in the midst of what was only perpetually evanescent, or eternally lost. Or it was a dance of the seeker and his goal, here pursuing still the gay colours he did not know he had assumed, there striving to identify the finer scene of which he might never realise he was already a part."

Would you deny the Consul such astounding visions? Me neither. In fact, I think I'll have a mescal myself …