[In the following excerpted review, Bradbury contrasts the main themes of Hear Us O Lord and Lowry's novel Under the Volcano.]

Malcolm Lowry has been variously claimed as an English and an American novelist, and his curious internationalism is one of the interesting things about him. Like the hero of 'Elephants and Colosseums'—one of the stories in this posthumous volume Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place—Lowry's success and reputation have been in America, where he lived extensively. Like Beckett and Durrell, to both of whom he bears great similarities technically, he was a literary expatriate whose travels provided him with a range for and a seriousness about his art which he was unlikely to have acquired at home; and what makes him interesting for the contemporary reader is his sense of literature as an international art, an art which demands great dedication and technical proficiency. His ostentation of manner, his wide literary allusiveness, his evident debts to writers as various as Thomas Wolfe and James Joyce, his deliberate formal experiments, all make him interesting in a period in which the English novel seems to have retired into a provincial quietness.

Lowry was born in 1909, attended an English public school, and at the age of eighteen he went to sea. His experiences gave him material for his first novel, Ultramarine, which he wrote as an undergraduate; it was published in 1933 and seems now not to be available. Soon after this he went to the United States and later to Mexico and then to British Columbia. In 1947 Under the Volcano, the novel on which his reputation has been based, was published—it is now reprinted as a Penguin Modern Classic. He had, however, many more works in progress, and when he died suddenly in 1957, he left a novel nearing completion, notes for several more, a large number of poems and the manuscript of this collection Hear Us O Lord. . . to which he was putting the finishing touches. The novel, October Ferry to Gabriola, is soon to be published. He had planned a sequence of six or possibly seven books, to be called The Voyage that Never Ends. Under the Volcano was to be its centre and the character Sigbjørn Wilderness, who appears for the first time in Hear Us O Lord. . . the central figure. These books must have been intended to exist in an exceedingly complex relation to one another. For instance, the story 'Through the Panama', in the new volume, is presented as being "From the Journal of Sigbjørn Wilderness", but it refers to a novel which Wilderness has written, called Through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, in which the characters are those that appear in Under the Volcano. Wilderness is also described as writing another novel which merges curiously into his own life as the journal goes on. The journal also contains the marginal summaries from "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner", given at the side of the text, as well as passages from guide-books and the like. Wilderness thus appears to be a figure for Lowry himself—but then so too did Firmin in Under the Volcano, and so too, in a later story, does another character, likewise a writer, who knows Wilderness. In this way an extremely complex mode of presentation is set up, one of its purposes seeming to be the distancing of Lowry's various versions of himself. Many of his characters are writers, with distinctively similar histories—with English, Manx or Scandinavian backgrounds. Themes which are present in one story are taken up and presented in another, and a repeated pattern in the stories is the violation of fiction by reality—thus the plot of 'Elephants and Colosseums' has to do with a writer's discovery of the dishonesty inherent in writing. Lowry likewise frequently builds up his characters in a highly romantic mode and then dissipates their romanticism in an extended and brilliant critique of it. One such passage occurs in 'Through the Panama'. . . . in which the romantic necessity for talent to be uncritical about itself is played off against the necessity for criticism, and then the concept of equilibrium emerges—"And yet there has never been a time in history when there was a greater necessity for the preservation of that seemingly most cold-blooded of all states, equilibrium, a greater necessity indeed for sobriety (how I hate it!)".

The use of such devices and the contrived violation of the literary probabilities he has set up for himself serves Lowry in that it enables him to pursue the honesties he is always careful to pursue; he is eternally worried about false renderings. In this respect, the wryness of his later work contrasts interestingly with Under the Volcano, which is a consistent and complete unity, a novel about a breaking personality handled throughout in a romantic mode. Perhaps the idea of placing this as part of the larger work is that the romanticism should be softened; at any rate, the new volume does throw light on Lowry's purposes for Under the Volcano itself. Lowry's heroes, as I have said, are recurrently figures for himself, for his purpose in art is to convey the experience of men of consciousness and conscience. By multiplying the figures, he is able to multiply his own experience of life, or rather to show the variety of his own interpretations. Lowry is a romantic; his themes are the despoliation of the world by man, and of the tragic condition of the serious spirit in the modern world. His heroes walk through landscapes of destruction and waste; they are the landscapes of hell. Lowry sees modern social institutions as in decline, man as cut off from his paradise and yet searching for peace: "The conquering of wilderness, whether in fact or in his mind, was part of his own process of self-determination." But this search leads to ruination and vulgarisation. Lowry interprets the situation differently through different characters—through Hugh the communist and Geoffrey the voice of wildness in Under the Volcano, through Wilderness the seafarer and other figures, including the author himself who emerges, so to speak, in the last story, in Hear Us O Lord. . . . The interpretations and possibilities vary, but the message is broadly apocalyptic. Geoffrey Firmin is 'doomed'—the book demands one uses the word—from the start because he is a wild spirit. But his excessive richness of manner is carefully played off against the minute, precise accuracy of description; he moves slowly through a world that is given us with the purest clarity. . . .

Lowry's recurrent theme is of man the artist in battle against the universe; his heroes are anguished men, symbolically or actually at sea and in voyage. Many are alcoholics, and most have, like Geoffrey Firmin, a beautiful woman, aristocratic in spirit, by whom they seek to be saved. These central figures recall those of Scott Fitzgerald, but the action is played out a much less realistic landscape. There are extended sea journals, done with great accuracy but carefully reinforced by an elaborate structure of literary allusion. Lowry's manner is as I have suggested enormously stylized; his landscapes are often given in order to provoke literary recollection, and he makes constant reference to an enormous barrage of reading that ranges from Prescott to Baudelaire, Marx to Thomas Wolfe. He copies down and gives at length notices, passages from travel books, poems; he creates extended set pieces from careful observation, the observation of the writer whose life has been long keeping of a journal. He puns like Joyce, and then talks about being "Joyced with his own petard". The literariness of manner often leads to literary lapses; and yet at other times it relates the experiences he is concerned with to the experience of all other writers, and so makes his work in a curious way—in Joyce's way—universal. It is not hard to find falsity and inadequacy in his work; the purpose of these comments is to suggest the largeness and the interest of his imagination, particularly to those who have deplored the limited use that most modern English novelists seem to be making of the possibilities of the novel form.