Drunk, lonely, and utterly lost

This little blog series was not intended to be, and will not be, chronological. But I can't avoid this one. It's a novel that I studied for A-Level English.

Books that have influenced my life, part the second: Under the Volcano, by Malcolm Lowry

I struggle to know where to begin, but here we go. In the summer of 1984, I was relatively happy for a teenager. Settled at a cosy Yorkshire comprehensive school, I was good at sport, good at books, and indescribably shy with girls. I had good O-Level grades in my pocket and life was sweet, if solo, sixteen. That summer my parents moved from Yorkshire to Somerset.

A year later, I was stranded in a middle-class boarding school that I detested, and that detested me in return. My abilities at sport and books declined. Any ability that I had had with girls disappeared completely. And we were studying Under the Volcano.

This whole entry could be subtitled 'How to pass an exam without knowing anything about the subject'. The novel tracks the last hours of a terminally alcoholic British ex-consul in Mexico on the Day of the Dead, as he drinks himself to death and simultaneously fails to cope with his adulterous wife and half-brother. On the other hand, I was 17, had never been drunk, had been abroad only twice (to Holland and Germany), and to my knowledge had never been in the same room as even a topless girl, never mind the full monty. The novel therefore took me well beyond my comfort zone. For the first time, I felt absolutely unable to comprehend literary material. It was not my world. Despairing drunken solitude in foreign countries was not on my compass, but it was the direction in which the novel was looking.

I passed the exam by falling back on tried-and-trusted O-Level methods of quotation and character analysis. It was another bump on the fall from innocence. I particularly remember that one passage in the novel decribes the British ex-consul's naked manhood in a rather unflattering manner. There was a collective 'urgh' from the girls in the class.

I learned, therefore, that men are not physically attractive, that it's shameful to be miserable, and that if you can't cope then it must be your own fault. Wrong-headed maybe, but that's what I learned.

For me, the novel generates loud echoes of a lonely life in unfriendly surroundings, where nobody really wants you around, and every step you take is false.

I have still never drunk mescal, but I do wonder if I should return to this book as an adult to see if the experience is somehow cathartic. If I do, please pull me out of my Mexican pit, away from the dead dogs and vomit.