Geoffrey Firmin is the alcoholic Consul living in Quauhnahuac. The Consul was born in India, and his mother died when he was young. His father remarried but walked away from his wife, his son Geoffrey, and his newly-born son Hugh, disappearing into the Himalayas. The stepmother dies soon afterward, and the Firmin boys are sent to England and taken in by the Taskersons. A naval officer during World War I, he was court-martialed and subsequently decorated for his actions aboard a submarine destroyer disguised as a merchant vessel (the captured German officers disappeared and were allegedly burned alive in the boiler). His appointment to the consular service is a kind of lateral promotion to get him out of the headlines, and he ends up with the sinecure of a consular position in a Mexican town with no British interests. By the novel's start he is actually an ex-consul: he resigned the service at the time when the UK and Mexico broke up diplomatic relationships in the aftermath of President Lázaro Cárdenas's 1938 nationalisation of the country's oil reserves. He wants to write a book on comparative mythology, but his alcoholism dominates all areas of his life.
Yvonne Constable is a former actress, born in Hawaii, who at age 14 began a brief career in the movies which she aborted and never picked up again. She has returned to Mexico after a long absence in the United States to rekindle her marriage to the Consul. She was married before and had a child, which died young; she may have had affairs with Hugh Firmin and Jacques Laruelle.
Hugh Firmin is Geoffrey's half-brother, a child-prodigy like Yvonne, who had interrupted a career as a singer-songwriter in England for a year at sea. After returning to England he falls in with the political left and supports the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. He visits Mexico to report on fascist activity for the London Globe , and is to leave the next day, to board a ship bringing ammunition to the Spanish government forces. There are frequent allusions in later chapters to an earlier affair between Hugh and Yvonne.
Jacques Laruelle (usually referred to as "M. Laruelle"), a French film director and childhood friend of the Consul. Born in the Moselle area, he grew up in Paris and became acquainted with the Consul during the summer of 1911 in the beach resort of Courseulles-sur-Mer, on the Channel. Independently of the Consul he has also moved to Quauhnahuac, and like Hugh has an affair with Yvonne. He is 42 when the novel starts and is preparing to leave Mexico.
Secondary characters
Dr. Arturo Díaz Vigil , a local physician, friend of the Consul and Laruelle.
Sr. Bustamente , owner of the local cinema.
Señora Gregorio , owner of the Terminal Cantina El Bosque , a bar in Quauhnahuac.
The Taskersons , the Consul's adoptive family; the patriarch, a poet named Abraham Taskerson, took Geoffrey in as a fifteen-year-old brooding poet. The entire family, including the mother and the at least six sons, drinks hard and takes long walks in the countryside around their home, across the River Mersey and with a view of the Welsh mountains.
Juan Cerillo , a Mexican national who was in Spain with Hugh and is now an agent for a cooperative holding made possible by the nationalisations of president Lázaro Cárdenas: he transports money between rural cooperatives and farmers and the national Credit Bank (much like the murdered Indian in Chapter VII). Cerillo is modelled on a real-life friend of Lowry's, Juan Fernando Márquez, whom he befriended during his 1936–1938 stay in Mexico and who also appears in Dark as the Grave Wherein my Friend is Laid .
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