The Green Man (Vintage Classics)
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Product Description
Book Description
'Contains all the best and familiar Amis qualities - including superb sexual comedy' Sunday Times
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.
Product Description
Maurice Allington is a worldly but haunted publican. His pub is inhabited by the spirit of Dr. Thomas Underhill, the seventeenth-century scholar rumored to have killed his wife. The local sexton had refused to dig Underhill's grave. The rector had declined to officiate at his funeral. And there are skeletons in the cupboard of Allington's own domestic affairs -- just rattling to get out...
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
26 of 28 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Some of the best and most entertaining fiction by Kingsley Amis is comparatively little known, and I am pleased to see The Green Man back in print. It has his usual virtues of offbeat humour, a gift for atmosphere, an engaging show of fogeyishness and some really memorable writing; and it has his occasional traits of implausibility, lapses of concentration and discursiveness, which I sometimes find irritating and sometimes entertaining depending on what mood I am in.
This is a distinctly original ghost story. Whether or not Amis found the original inspiration for his green man in legends, or in The Golden Bough, or in other fiction I have no idea. I can’t think of a similar creature in similar literature that I have come across, perhaps simply because there is no similar literature. The thread of the preternatural does not dominate the narrative, which is largely concerned with the interactions between the narrator and his family and acquaintances. The story is told by an alcoholic publican, remarkably lucid and vigorous for the most part, and opinionated and prejudiced in a way that suggests to me that the author had put some of himself into the character. He is the only character in the book who is drawn in the round, but his alcohol-dependency is not investigated in any depth, simply treated as a necessity to the plot. He is bored, grumpy and dissatisfied – familiar enough Amis themes – and predictably in search of sexual, if not precisely emotional, interest outside his rather flat and uninvolving marriage. To me, he is not completely convincing. He is rather grandly detached and above-it-all for someone with such a massive and corrosive problem of his own, but that is not the sort of quibble I would expect to bother Amis.
The real reason for the alcoholic theme is that the author is being a bit of an old tease. Allington, the publican, sees some pretty amazing things, and we are supposed to be left wondering to what extent they are objectively real and to what extent drink-induced delusions. For the most part they were real for me, and I believe real from the author’s standpoint too, until the latter stages of the book. Here I detect a touch of wheel-spin – I simply think Amis is losing the plot a little, a suspicion confirmed by the way he winds up the narration in a slightly perfunctory manner. It’s a fine story for all that. It will certainly appeal to his aficionados in general if they have not yet got around to it, and if you acquire it for a 5-or-6-hour flight or train journey on a caveat lector basis, I shall be disappointed if you are disappointed.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
M R James kept well away from the hurly-burly of the chaise-longue; towards the end of his life, he observed that writers of horror stories were beginning to "drag in sex, which is a fatal mistake; sex is tiresome enough in the novels; in a ghost story, or as the backbone of a ghost story, I have no patience with it". However, although "The Green Man" includes probably as much how's-your-father as any Amis novel, it is a worthy successor to the James tradition.
Maurice Allington, like most Amis heroes, is an intellectual snob, has a drink problem, and finds monogamy a severe challenge. So far par for the course. However, even by Amis standards this novel gets alarmingly close to his own situation at the time:
-Allington is coming to a crisis point in his marriage to his second wife ("Joyce"/ Elizabeth Jane Howard)
-He has difficulty connecting to his teenage daughter ("Amy"/the tragic Sally Amis)
-The only person who is his intellectual equal and who, while loving him, can put him in his place is his son ("Nick"/Martin Amis)
Thus Allington's mid-life crisis closely mirrors Amis' own malaise. The "struggling young academic" theme of the first four novels is left far behind, and Allington is faced with very strong intimations of mortality. The novel is a major step towards the ageing self-doubt of "Jake's Thing" and "Stanley and the Women".
Allington runs a country inn (it would now be called, to Amis' disgust, a gastropub) which has a well-documented ghost. Hitherto this has meant little more to him than a selling point to credulous guests, but the ghost gradually moves into Allington's life, ultimately offering him a Faustian pact. At first the ghost has an easy job, as the manifestations it creates are similar to the effects of the delirium tremens which Allington either already has experienced or is about to (it's not quite clear which). However, Allington grows into a worthy adversary for his spectral nemesis.
One of the amazon.com reviewers interprets the novel as a parody of another James - Henry, in "Turn of the Screw" (which I didn't finish - it didn't grab me, mea culpa). Scandalously, there are 13 reviews of "The Green Man" on amazon.com, but prior to mine only one on amazon.co.uk. A prophet in his own country ...
As always in Amis, there is humour, but it is less gratuitous and much darker than usual. The only real comic character is a 1960s "swinging vicar", and even here the vicar's trendiness is relevant to his part in the story.
Ghost stories often include an appearance of a saint, a good angel etc, but I can't think of many where a personification of God Himself appears. (This often happens in film, but not in literature.) This is a very difficult literary device to pull off, and Amis' success shows his skill. He even contrives to get God to discuss how accurately he (God) was portrayed by Milton.
As usual, Amis has several gratuitous axes to grind, including (surprisingly) attributing to Allington a hate of the "puny and piffling art" of novelists.
Maurice Allington, like most Amis heroes, is an intellectual snob, has a drink problem, and finds monogamy a severe challenge. So far par for the course. However, even by Amis standards this novel gets alarmingly close to his own situation at the time:
-Allington is coming to a crisis point in his marriage to his second wife ("Joyce"/ Elizabeth Jane Howard)
-He has difficulty connecting to his teenage daughter ("Amy"/the tragic Sally Amis)
-The only person who is his intellectual equal and who, while loving him, can put him in his place is his son ("Nick"/Martin Amis)
Thus Allington's mid-life crisis closely mirrors Amis' own malaise. The "struggling young academic" theme of the first four novels is left far behind, and Allington is faced with very strong intimations of mortality. The novel is a major step towards the ageing self-doubt of "Jake's Thing" and "Stanley and the Women".
Allington runs a country inn (it would now be called, to Amis' disgust, a gastropub) which has a well-documented ghost. Hitherto this has meant little more to him than a selling point to credulous guests, but the ghost gradually moves into Allington's life, ultimately offering him a Faustian pact. At first the ghost has an easy job, as the manifestations it creates are similar to the effects of the delirium tremens which Allington either already has experienced or is about to (it's not quite clear which). However, Allington grows into a worthy adversary for his spectral nemesis.
One of the amazon.com reviewers interprets the novel as a parody of another James - Henry, in "Turn of the Screw" (which I didn't finish - it didn't grab me, mea culpa). Scandalously, there are 13 reviews of "The Green Man" on amazon.com, but prior to mine only one on amazon.co.uk. A prophet in his own country ...
As always in Amis, there is humour, but it is less gratuitous and much darker than usual. The only real comic character is a 1960s "swinging vicar", and even here the vicar's trendiness is relevant to his part in the story.
Ghost stories often include an appearance of a saint, a good angel etc, but I can't think of many where a personification of God Himself appears. (This often happens in film, but not in literature.) This is a very difficult literary device to pull off, and Amis' success shows his skill. He even contrives to get God to discuss how accurately he (God) was portrayed by Milton.
As usual, Amis has several gratuitous axes to grind, including (surprisingly) attributing to Allington a hate of the "puny and piffling art" of novelists.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Kingsley Amis talks somewhere about a critic who traced the decline of Amis's career to the moment he produced a ghost story. Well, 'The Green Man' is that ghost story and in one way, the critic was quite right: this is a significant book in Amis's career. However, I reckon the critic erred in thinking this book marked a downturn for Amis, when really 'The Green Man' shows Amis striking out in some totally unexpected but refreshing ways. The central character, Maurice Allington, is another of Amis's Sixties / Seventies roll-call of lightly-disguised self-portraits: a man getting on in years who has a fondness for booze, a complicated personal life and a reflective side that his life doesn't quite satisfy. If that sounds like familiar Amis territory, please note this really is a ghost story too - and a thoroughly successful one.
Allington's hotel / pub proves to be hosting the restless spirit of a 17th century cleric of very peculiar antiquarian tastes, and the resulting duel between Allington and the spectral Dr. Underhill takes us into classic M. R. James territory. (There's nothing cutesy or ethereal about the presences that crowd around Allington - tangible menace is the keynote.) I won't spoil the plot any further but Underhill is not the only spiritual presence Allington encounters and there's a scene about halfway through where Allington receives a thunderously unexpected guest wherein Amis pulls off a trick that I would have thought almost impossible. (Another pleasure is a spot-on pastiche of a trendy cleric.)
A fine Amis novel and a cracking ghost story.
Allington's hotel / pub proves to be hosting the restless spirit of a 17th century cleric of very peculiar antiquarian tastes, and the resulting duel between Allington and the spectral Dr. Underhill takes us into classic M. R. James territory. (There's nothing cutesy or ethereal about the presences that crowd around Allington - tangible menace is the keynote.) I won't spoil the plot any further but Underhill is not the only spiritual presence Allington encounters and there's a scene about halfway through where Allington receives a thunderously unexpected guest wherein Amis pulls off a trick that I would have thought almost impossible. (Another pleasure is a spot-on pastiche of a trendy cleric.)
A fine Amis novel and a cracking ghost story.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Clever and creepy, but lacks a certain something
The Green Man of Kingsley Amis' novel is, in fact, a pub. If the book hadn't been written in 1969, it would doubtless be called a 'gastropub' or even a 'restaurant with rooms', but... Read more
Published 4 months ago by Joanne Sheppard
The Green Man
How can anyone possibly define the Green Man, or even Kingsley Amis for that matter? Kingsley has, with The Green Man, created a novel that encompasses numerous genres, not many... Read more
Published 8 months ago by Teddy Ludford
If You Go into the Woods Today...
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... Read more
Published 14 months ago by conjunction
Funny, Frighteing, Unpretentious
Young Mart could never manage so accomplished a thing as this. This book makes you laugh but it can also make you shiver, especially in the early chapters. Read more
Published 17 months ago by Morphybum
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