Under the Volcano did not belong in its postwar timeframe. When it was published, the world was still digging out of the ruins of the Second World War. Lowry, of course, had written his crucial early drafts in Mexico during the war's prelude period; the loss of the Battle of the Ebro in the Spanish Civil War is a recurring reference. The main dialectic of the novel — although certainly not its theme — is a debate between Geoffrey and his half-brother Hugh on the futility of involvement (the Consul's view) in all those people's revolutions, including the Civil War in Spain, that were so much a part of the political climate when Lowry began to write. These years — 1936 to 1938 — were times when ominous notes of exile and doom were being sounded in the works of European novelists as little known in America as...