Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #812724 in Books
• Published on: 1991-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 252 pages

Review
"Aside from dextrously woven horror and the humor, the book has a fine character study of a self-indulgent man who is literally terrified into assuming his family obligations."

From the Publisher
7 1-hour cassettes

From AudioFile
The Green Man is an English country pub run by a typical Kingsley Amis progatonist, a smart, ironical alcoholic philanderer named Maurice Allingham. The pub is haunted by a wicked seventeenth-century scholar and murderer in the Faustian mode named Thomas Underhill. In his truck with the supernatural dark side, Underhill also raised an evil spirit of the forest apparently made of tree parts, known as The Green Man, who rises again when Allingham tries to sort out the skeletons in his closets. Amis in gothic mode is very entertaining, if not very believable, and Steven Pacey does a deft and fluent job of bringing this lively tale to life. B.G. © AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Customer Reviews

Through a whisky glass, darkly
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

Engaging reading
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.

A SUCCESSFUL SATIRE AND THRILLER FROM KINGSLEY AMIS
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.