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 Interesting mix of horror and satire September 23, 2008
Kingsley Amis's 'The Green Man' is an interesting mix of horror and satire. Maurice Allington is the alcoholic owner of The Green Man Inn, whose main preoccupation is trying to convince his wife and mistress to have a menage a trois. The Green Man Inn dates back several centuries and is reputed to be haunted, although Maurice himself had never seen anything in his years as owner, until one night he sees a mysterious red headed woman on his stair. This is followed by the sudden death of his father who appeared to have seen something before dying of a stroke. Other strange occurrences follow, but his doctor and family think they are hallucinations brought on by stress and excessive drinking. Unfortunately the story loses a lot of its momentum when God (appearing as a well dressed young man) pays a visit. The scene is clever and funny, but Amis sacrifices all the suspenseful buildup to write a clever piece of satire. More successful is the character of the agnostic local Anglican priest, although I didn't think Amis explored all the possibilities inherent in that character given the nature of the story. Still a very enjoyable read, just keep in mind it's not a straight horror story.
Humor rather than terror was the driving theme of this novel. August 17, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
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.
More funny than scary... July 22, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
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.
 Convivial spirits November 12, 2006
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
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.
A SUCCESSFUL SATIRE AND THRILLER FROM KINGSLEY AMIS December 12, 2005
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
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.
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