One of the refreshing aspects of Frederick Asals’s study is that the author seems undaunted by the enormity of the task of determining the conception and subsequent ordering of Lowry’s drafts of the novel. From those biographical critics who both celebrate and deplore Lowry’s legendary excesses at the expense of his work as a writer to those who would render unreadable critical cartographies of the book, which only make Under the Volcano resemble a catalogue of footnotes, most Lowry scholars harbor the same wish: why couldn’t Lowry have revised the novel in a straight line? That is, why couldn’t he have simply rewritten the book from beginning to end? The half-century of research that has followed his Under the Volcano is as complex a text as the novel itself. Malcolm Lowry was an inconsiderate writer.
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