The last day of Geoffrey Firmin, British consul in a Mexican town, drunk, estranged from his ex-wife who has returned, unable to stop drinking even as he knows it will kill him. Lowry spent a decade on this novel, rewrote it entirely at least twice, and poured his own alcoholism into its pages. The prose is dense with allusion, the Mexican setting hallucinatory, the Day of the Dead imagery pervasive. The consul's descent is both particular and mythic. The novel is about addiction, about love, about the soul's choice of damnation. It is almost too painful to read. It demands to be read.