Book Of A Lifetime: Under the Volcanom, by Malcolm Lowry

I've got my battered 1975 Penguin Modern Classics copy of Under the Volcano next to me as I write; the back cover has fallen off and the front cover is more or less hanging on, like the hero Geoffrey Firmin just about does for most of the book. Under the Volcano was the great alcoholic writer Malcolm Lowry's life's work, and a book that has haunted me for decades because of the power of its prose and its theme of self-destruction and redemption, which appealed to me as a young man obsessed with Dylan Thomas and Jimi Hendrix, and still grips me as a middle-aged granddad who notices his grey hair turning white and has to sit directly under a reading lamp because the print in the paper is so small these days.

The story of Under the Volcano is a simple one: it's the Day of the Dead in the small town of Quauhnahuac in Mexico, and the aforementioned ex-British Consul Firmin is drinking himself to death as his ex-wife, with whom he is still obsessed, drifts in and out of his life and the day wears on and he moves from bar to bar until he finally dies and somebody chucks a dead dog onto his body as it lies at the foot of a ravine. That's it. Lowry was never strong on plot; the glory of Under the Volcano is the prose, the tumultuous sentences, the impossibly romantic paragraphs that build like banks of clouds in the Mexican sky before they tumble in on themselves like water in a fountain in a white-walled Mexican village square. He's got me at it now!

Here's his ex-wife Yvonne reflecting on the name of Oaxaca, a town where she and Geoffrey were very much in love: "The word was like a breaking heart, a sudden peal of stifled bells in a gale, the last syllables of one dying of thirst in the desert. Did she remember Oaxaca? The roses and the great tree, was that, the dust and the buses to Etla and Nochitlan?" Here's the moment of Firmin's death rendered in crashing Lowryesque music: "the world itself was bursting, bursting into black spouts of villages catapulted into space, with himself falling through it all, through the inconceivable pandemonium of a million tanks, through the blazing of ten million burning bodies, falling, into a forest, falling..." Imagine reading that as a sensitive bookish student far from home with a copy of On the Road in your pocket and a poster of Thomas Chatterton on the wall.

Under the Volcano is a book I turn to when the world seems too ordinary, when my walk to the newsagent's each morning seems devoid of magic, when every novel I read seems to be about small people making small decisions over kitchen tables, and every new poem I come across seems to make one simple point in 15 stanzas that a stand-up comedian could make in one gag. Under the Volcano renews my faith in literature as a power for good in the world, and you can't ask for more than that from an old Penguin Modern Classic with the cover hanging off.

Ian McMillan's 'Talking Myself Home' is published next week by John Murray