Gordon Bowker's great achievement is to set before the reader Malcolm Lowry's epic, frustrating story, its contradictions and comedies intact, without distortion or embellishment. Friends, relatives, wives, and doctors have helped Bowker to paint an unblinking portrait of the man and the writer. He has scoured archives, followed in Lowry's footsteps, and unearthed many revealing photographs to produce this entirely trustworthy biography. The real Malcolm Lowry emerges - and wills readers to turn again to his underexposed, underprized fiction wherein he mapped out a unique landscape. Pursued by Furies is the surest guide we are ever likely to have to that dark terrain.Pursued by Furies traces Lowry's mythical life, covering his voyage around the world on a steamship, when he severed his ties to his stiff Methodist upbringing for a dockside life - an odyssey he crystallized into Ultramarine. After going in and out of bars, countries, clinics, and jail, Lowry eventually achieved a respite on the British Columbian waterfront. Here he managed to turn his "furies into mercies," and to carve out of his curious experiences in Mexico his magnificent novel Under the Volcano. Read Less