Two years after this came "The Lung", in which Farrell returned to his real-life trauma of less than a decade earlier: the main character Martin Sands contracts polio and has to spend a long period in hospital. It has been noted that it is somewhat modelled after Farrell, but it is modelled more after Geoffrey Firmin from Malcolm Lowry's 1947 novel, "Under the Volcano". The anonymous reviewer for "The Observer" on 31 October 1965 wrote, "Mr. Farrell gives the pleasantly solid impression of really having something to write about", and one for "The Times Literary Supplement" on 11 November 1965 that "Mr. Farrell's is an effective, potent brew, compounded of desperation and a certain wild hilarity."