Customer Reviews

The Green Man

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In the early 1970s Amis seemed to be looking for a new direction. His initial series of comedies (_Lucky Jim_ and its successors in broadly similar mode) had begun bringing in diminishing returns, at least in terms of critical attention and sales. And later, in the 1980s, Amis found a different kind of form with _The Old Devils_ and his last books.

But at more or less the mid-point in his career Amis experimented with a series of genre novels. Of this series _The Alteration_ was science fiction (an alternate-worlds story in which the Reformation never happened), _The Riverside Murders_ is more or less in the English murder mystery tradition (that is, there is more interest in the puzzle than in the US crime novel, but at its best the English whodunnit is also more likely to give us human characters rather than groteques). _The Green Man_ is the last and most successful of the series, and is in the horror genre.

As a horror story "The Green Man" offers only mild chills, but its other rewards are substantial. It's a portrait of Maurice Allingham, drinker, womaniser and host of The Green Man, an English hotel with a fine table, excellent wine list, and a couple of picturesque ghosts, though with no recent sightings.

Maurice is both cynical and observant, yet he misses much of what is important of what goes on around him. The things he misses include sinister stirrings around him that indicate that the supernatural elements around him have not been so much extinct as dormant, and are now reawakening. More importantly he fails to observe almost everything of importance about those who are closest to him, his long(ish) suffering wife, his lonely, resentful teenage daughter, and his son, who has already moved on from him.

Though we are invited to see through Allingham's eyes, we are also given a portrait of Allingham, a man who has gone a long way on charm but is finding that trait not enough, any more, to stave off the consequences of various kinds of misbehaviour. With women he finds that they are still prepared to bed him, but they no longer seem to like him much. With his drinking he finds he can still lie to his doctor, but he cannot deny - at least to himself - the danger signs: shakes, mild strokes, visual and auditory hallucinations. And his teenage daughter still resents his absense from her life; but she is coming close to not minding any more.

Some critics have missed the strength and trenchancy of Amis' critique of his male narrators. Amis is often accused of misogyny for portrayals such as the women in "The Green Man", when in fact it is principally the narrator who Amis is mocking, not the women the narrator comments on.

This is the book that contains the famous "threesome" scene, in which the two women participants soon lose interest in the male narrator who believes he set up the scene. Maurice tries and fails to attract at least some attention, find a spare limb to involve himself with, and eventually gives up and gets dressed. The scene has been misread from time to time; it is probably not intended as a portrait of what Amis thinks must inevitably happen in a threesome, but rather a comic come-uppance for a character whose extreme selfishness, sexual and otherwise, is well delineated.

Both women then leave Maurice for good, showing in doing so considerably more strength or moral dignity than Maurice has yet managed. (There is a redemption, of sorts, towards the end of the book, when his attention is finally focussed, almst too late, on his daughter.) But Amis is, in most of his career (_Jake's Thing_ and _Stanley and the Women_ being exceptions) a more painful critic of male behaviour than of female.

Amis' use of the darker English folklore - the "Green Man" and "Thomas Underhill" myths - are also interestingly sinister. And the portrayal of "God" as a slightly camp, terribly urbane young man is one that has been hugely influential - in an unacknowledged way - in popular culture since "The Green Man" appeared.

By the way I think it clear that the supernatural events are "real". Maurice is not given his shakes and hallucinations to indicate that he is an unreliable observer in the manner of Henry James' governess in "The Turn of the Screw". The contrast is pointed, in fact, with an entertaining parody of James' prose style in the book. It is clear that Maurice does not "see things" in that sense or to quite that extent (in fact his trouble is that he does _not_ see things). Rather, Maurice's shakes, voices and palpitations mean that he will not be believed by his family, and he is forced to deal with things on his own.

This is a very fine comic novel, with mild horror and (as often with Amis) a little more depth than it pretends to.

Cheers!

Laon

Kingsley Amis' sole horror novel, "The Green Man," had long been on my list of "must read" books, for the simple reason that it has been highly recommended by three sources that I trust. British critic David Pringle chose it for inclusion in his overview volume "Modern Fantasy: The 100 Best Novels," as did Michael Moorcock in "Fantasy: The 100 Best Books" AND Brian Aldiss in "Horror: 100 Best Books." As it turns out, all of this praise is not misplaced, and Amis' 1969 novel of modern-day satire and the supernatural is as entertaining as can be. The tale concerns a middle-aged man named Maurice Allington, who owns an inn called The Green Man in rural Hertfordshire, not far from Cambridge. Allington, when we meet him, is being kept busy running his inn, struggling through a floundering second marriage, dealing with his sullen 13-year-old daughter, drinking incredible amounts of scotch every day, and attempting to talk his new mistress into a three-way with him and his wife. As if he doesn't have enough on his plate, the ghost of diabolical necromancer Dr. Thomas Underhill --who used to live in the inn some 300 years before--has been contacting him of late, and the legendary Green Man himself (a sort of lumbering tree monster) has begun to make appearances, too. Those closest to poor Maurice suspect that his stories of ghosts and tiny birds that fly through his hand are a result of the DT's (it really is remarkable how much liquor Maurice drinks in a day), but the reader somehow never doubts that what Maurice sees is objective reality... Mixing social satire, amusing incidents and some good eerie scenes, "The Green Man" does keep the reader enthralled. Amis, no stranger to the bottle himself, from what I've read, seems to really identify with Allington, and uses him as his mouthpiece to expound eruditely on topics such as food (a hateful, bothersome nuisance), death (he wonders how one cannot be totally obsessed with the idea), sex (he thinks that women's "emotional secretiveness" is due to the fact that they do not ejaculate) and religion (Maurice's views of the afterlife are radically turned about by what he goes through in this tale). In one startling section of the book, Maurice meets a nice young man in a dark suit who stops Time and who, it is inferred, is none other than God himself, and another fascinating conversation ensues. "The Green Man" is not an especially frightening book, although some parts (the reading of Underhill's diary; the midnight disinterment of Underhill's grave; Maurice's "nighttime" vision in broad daylight) are indeed genuinely creepy. This is an extremely literate, extremely British ghost story that functions as both satire and thriller. In another section of the book, Maurice tells us that he thinks all novelists engage in a "puny and piffling art," and that fiction is pitifully inadequate to the task it sets itself. But perhaps narrator Maurice should read back the book he has just delivered to us; it is neither puny nor piffling, and succeeds on many levels indeed.

I saw a movie of "The Green Man" on A&E a few years back, and it didn't make any damn sense (save for the brilliant casting of Albert Finney as Maurice Allington), so I read the book. Wow! It was a treat.

Maurice isn't the sort of man I would like, nor do I suspect he would like me, but somehow he works well as a narrator. The story engages on several levels: you spend much time debating (especially after Allington sees "God") whether we aren't simply privy to the pitiful delusions of a pill and alcohol gulping man on his last legs rather than dealing with the understatedly fiendish Dr. Underhill and his monstrous creation.

Who knows, and who cares? Great read.

An extremely clever well written novel of suspense, The Green Man, is also full of social satire and even some existential metaphysical speculation. The Green Man appears in the ancient religions of the British isles, especially around Druid nature worship, May Day, and the character of Jack of the Greens. Amis takes the usual image of the Green Man, a human character composed of leaves, vines, flowers, twigs. However Amis has this creature become a homicidal monster under the influence of evil, a nice twist on the theme.

I am not sure whether I would call the book a book about terror since only once does the presence of the terrifying conglomeration of twigs and leaves, the Green Man, become threatening. Rather, the narrative follows two parallel suspenseful paths. In one narrative path, Maurice, the owner of a country inn, restaurant, and pub is trying to seduce his neighbor's wife and convince her to engage in a three-way sexual encounter while at the same time trying to convince his young second wife, Joyce, to engage in this activity. His marrage to a hard working, devoted, attractive, adoring wife is falling apart due to Maurice's lack of attention and involvement.

In the other narrative path, first Maurice's father and then Maurice begin to see apparitions of the evil ghost Dr. Thomas Underhill, or the ghost of Underhill's poor murdered red-haired wife, or hears the breaking twigs and branches as the Green Man stalks the inn looking for unlocked doors. Both of these themes are woven skillfully together to ensure the book is a complete page-turner. We ask ourselves, does Maurice get both women into bed? We also ask, does Maurice figure out the nature of the ghosts that are appearing to him?

Amis keeps the reader on our toes since Maurice runs around having sex, taking pills, drinking far too much liquor, investigating the ghosts in his Inn, trying to bury his recently deceased father, and run a customer-oriented service-business. To this add his neglected bored teenaged daughter with whom Maurice never communicates in a genuine manner. Thus we are not sure as to how much of the visions of ghosts are real and how much is produced by the combination of pills and alcohol.

We are treated to a clever conversation between Maurice and the Devil on the nature of existence and death, both of which the Devil can only offer sarcastic and pointed observations but few insights. Amis dresses the Devil in the latest grays and blacks, sounding much more like a runway model than the embodiment of evil. We are also treated to Maurice's encounters with an agnostic know-it-all Church of England priest. Amis' descriptions of this priest are almost are priceless as Jane Austen's insightful descriptions of Reverend Collins in Pride and Prejudice, where the priest is a very foolish character. However a priest can perform exorcism, whether he believes in it or not, and a exorcism is eventually needed in this drama.

While having sex in the woods, drinking excessively all day, and keeping customers happy in the Inn, Maurice tries to study and track down the secrets around Dr. Thomas Underhill. Solving this mystery gets increasingly dangerous and suspenseful. Despite the alcoholism, Maurice is actually an extremely clever man, which is certainly lucky for him when he tries to outwit the ghost of Dr. Underhill, an apparition that we come to see as increasingly evil and dangerous with each page.

This book is highly recommended. It is well crafted and thoughtful and fully entertaining. The suspense is balanced with off-beat witty sarcastic humor which at times made me laugh out loud. I found the humor rather than the terror was the driving force behind the novel, which is a good attribute.

Maurice Allington -- attractive, alcoholic, and fifty-three -- runs a small inn in the West Country, The Green Man, that is haunted by a most unquiet spirit: Dr Thomas Underhill, a seventeenth-century wizard with a reputation for killing his wife and other enemies by means of the black arts. Host and ghost would seem on the surface to have little in common, except Maurice has a dark side, an interest in sexual mischief and a tendency to use other people to get what he wants. When the heavy-drinking Maurice, who narrates the story, begins to see Dr Underhill and other ghosts about his inn himself, he cannot make his friends or family he is visited by anything other than the DTs; his siutation becomes desperate when he realizes the good dead doctor has a plan in store for him.

Thanks in part to a well-cast television adaptation with Albert Finney, Kingsley Amis's amusing little 1969 Gothic has oddly turned out to be one of the best-remembered of his novels (after LUCKY JIM, of course), even though it was mostly an experiment in genre. The ghost story is well done, and Maurice himself proves a very intelligent and convivial companion; still, the novel is less well executed than its elegant size and style might suggest (the scene with Maurice speaking with God seems a real mistake, and none of the other characters seems very well fleshed out). The thoughtfulness of the ghost story is still appreciated, especially since it came from an era when they were not so greatly in fashion. But you can't help wishing Amis had done a bit more with it--it seems (perhaps fittingly?) too insubstantial.

This is the first novel I've read by Kingsley Amis and I intend to read more. I decided to begin with this one over Lucky Jim because of its inclusion in Horror: 100 Best Books. It tells the story of Maurice Allington, who owns a very nice inn in the English countryside. It is supposed to be haunted, and Maurice will immediately tell the local legends, but he has never seen anything, until...

Now, I don't know how effective this is as a bit of horror literature - by which, I mean it isn't really scary. There is an appearance by a creepy monster but after the appearance of the "Young Man," the novel makes such a significant break with reality that there is no real tension anymore.

The pleasure in the book comes from the wit of the narrator. He's not really concerned with ghosts - he's mostly working out how to engineer a three-way with his wife and his mistress. The funniest bit comes when he's justifying himself and then breaks the fourth wall and tells the reader off for judging him. Too much of the book is taken up with metaphysical musings and British anti-religiosity is rather boring by now. On the other hand, I was impressed enough with his style to go on to some of his other works.

Different people expect different things from works of supernatural fiction - some like plenty of bad-tempered fiends and flying gore a la Clive Barker, while others prefer the more ponderous, "what-if-it really-happened" feel of The X Files or the short stories of M.R. James. Amis' novel offers what is to my mind a much more satisfying kind of scare, one which involves a blurring of the lines between outer and inner malignancies - between our fear of the quiet rustlings and creaks that whisper through the walls of our homes, and that of the faint stirrings of even darker forces within our selves. The protagonist of this novel, Maurice Allington, is in many ways an attractive character - gregarious, witty and restless in the presence of fools - but he is also an abominably selfish and morally slovenly human being whose libidinal fantasies about the women in his life are forever in danger of creeping a little too close to the surface. These features of his character recommend him to the attention of an old inhbitant of the little country inn theat he manages - a philosopher, alchemist, and mystic who, in addition to having been dead for over two-hundred years, is in the position to make Maurice an offer that he may not be able to refuse... _The Green Man_ is full of scary scenes - ghostly arrivals, an excorcism, a confrontation with the dreadful, elemental monster of the title, and a truly unforgettable "interview with God" (the Devil? the Grim Reaper? It's hard to tell with the theologically intractable Amis). The climax of the novel is thoroughly satisfying, and reveals Amis to be something of an optimist about human nature, at least to the extent that he believes we are able to recoil from our most truly horrifying desires and shut the door on them before they break through the forest and tear apart our homes.

I feel curmudgeonly only giving this four stars, it should be four and a half. It fails only by comparison with his very best, for me `Take a Girl like You', `The Old Devils' and the brilliant `One Fat Englishman'.

Like `The After-Death League' this is an exploration into metaphysical realms, but a much more satisfactory one. The earlier book had style but a number of objectives seemed to be competing with each other, whereas this is a splendid Faustian fable which holds together extremely well.

It seems like a mid-life attempt to map reality for a man who lived life a full-tilt and had no intention of putting on the brakes but nevertheless needed to check out what his satnav was telling him.

I am not a connoisseur of horror or ghost stories but I thought certain scenes in here, as mentioned by other reviewers, are superb. Kingsley is not everyone's idea of a hippy, but it was 1969 and one of the main figures is very reminiscent of the excellent film `The Wicker Man', tapping in as it does into some proper old English mythology.

Delightful, and memorable.

I think it's fair to say that Amis has fallen out of fashion.This book is out of print and hasn't been reviewed in years.That is a shame.Your'e missing something by not reading Amis.He was not a profound writer.You won't mistake him for Doestoyevsky or Kafka.What he was, was a sharp ,acerbic observer and a very funny one at that.Amis comes across as a writer who kept depression , even , despair at bay with a mixture of humor,detachment and alcohol.It didn't work too well in his life but it's the basis of some of funniest 20th century fiction your'e likely to read.
I suspect that most people who read Amis have a favorite novel and it's my guess that it usually is LUCKY JIM.I can understand that because LUCKY JIM is a comic masterpiece,it is one the funniest books ever written.However ,I actually prefer THE GREEN MAN.It's a subtler more mature work.The main character Maurice is actually a pretty awful person but I couldn't help laughing at his predicaments(usually self created).Amis liked genre fiction and in this novel he takes a stab at the supernatural.He does a pretty good job at creating a credibly creepy atmosphere.There really is a ghost out there.Maurice even gets to meet God!Yet the novel does not strive for profoundity or philosophical depth, to its credit.Amis is perfectly content to leave that to others.Thus he avoids the deadening pretension and ersatz seriousness of so many lesser writers.Maurices grand project is to have a threesome wth his wife and another woman and much of the novel focuses on this somewhat absurd quest that goes comically awry.
What you get here is an excellently done portrait of the way we live now that throws in a decent ghost story ,some philosophical reflection and a number of laughs.There are very few authors who can carry this off as deftly as Amis.

I really enjoyed this book. It starts out as some sort of English comedy -- a guy who owns a pub, has a drinking problem, has health problems, has a marriage problem, has a mistress problem, and has children problems, suddenly starts seeing ghosts.

Of course no one believes him, since he's probably drunk, under stress, or on medication, and it seems the more he tries to get people to believe him, the worse his predicament gets. But as he comes closer to discovering the origins of the name of his pub, The Green Man, the horror starts to take charge over comedy.

The ending is delightful, English, and quite satisfying.