Late in the decade-long evolution of Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry introduced the Northern Paradise motif. He developed it during years of relative sobriety in Canada in the 1940s. It was here that Lowry for once found himself able to rise from his ritual burning in Mexico. It was in British Columbia that he evolved a separate, though related, fictional persona: that of an outsider — usually a struggling writer or musician — facing eviction from his beach refuge. It was a theme he would try to build into a Paradise to balance the Inferno of Under the Volcano. In the process, Lowry's concerns reached to the world outside the psyche of one rootless addict.

The fourteen years in Canada produced a brilliant novella, several outstanding stories, and an unfinished novel which, had Lowry been able to give it the nurture of Under the Volcano, might...