I have no novelists, finding theirs a puny and piffling art, one that, even at its best, can render truthfully no more than a few minor parts of the total world it pretends to take as its field of reference.” So declares Mr. Maurice Allington while scanning the books of his personal library in the study of his rustic country inn, The Green Man. The King's English: A Guide to Modern Usage (name in part a pun as he was sometimes called "Kingers" or "The King" by friends and family, as told by his son Martin in his memoir Experience) The Green Man ( ISBN 978-0-89733-220-0) is a 1969 novel by British author Kingsley Amis. A Times Literary Supplement reviewer described The Green Man as "three genres of novel in one": ghost story, moral fable, and comic novel. The novel reflects Amis's willingness to experiment with genre novels (e.g., The Alteration (science fiction/alternate history), or Colonel Sun: (A James Bond Adventure)) while displaying many of the characteristics of his conventional novels, both in superficial aspects such as fogeyishness and problems with alcohol, and in more substantive aspects such as a self-reflective observation of human cruelty and selfishness in everyday relations. The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". The Times. ISSN 0140-0460 . Retrieved 26 September 2020. I read the Green Man while heavily boozing in Berlin, and let me tell you, going drink for drink with the protagonist was a wake up call. Amis gives you an up and down horror/suspense story, set in a pub, obviously, as plotlines in Amis' stories tend not to happen more then ten paces from a drink. As it is an Amis plotline, the main storyline is bulked out by the heavy drinking of the protagonist, and his fumbling engineering of a three-way with his wife and her best friend. So something for everyone.

A final scene wraps up the novel's loose ends: Maurice destroys the figurine, and he employs the modish, cynical and repellent parish priest (who makes God out to be, in the young man's words, a “suburban Mao Tse-tung”) to exorcise Underhill and his green man. Maurice wonders why a being like Underhill should have been drawn to him, of all the potential targets across all the centuries, and is humiliated by the possible explanations. Maurice's wife leaves him (for his mistress), but his daughter proposes, and he agrees to, a plan to move away from The Green Man and get a fresh start. Maurice is somewhat relieved, while recognising that he will remain until his death trapped in all of the faults, petty and otherwise, that constitute him as Maurice Allington.Ritchie, Harry (1988). Success Stories: Literature and the Media in England, 1950–1959. Faber & Faber. ISBN 0-571-14764-X. The Amis Inheritance—Profile on Martin and Kingsley Amis by Charles McGrath from New York Times Magazine (22 April 2007). He sees ghosts. He tears up the floorboards in the inn looking for a magic charm; he digs up a grave with his female friend at night. He travels to All Saints to do research on a mysterious former owner of the inn. He gets in a car accident. He’s a busy, obsessed guy.

This leads to the finest segment in the novel - a startling scene in which a young man, erudite, self-assured, shows up to have a bit of a talk over a glass of Scotch. It is superbly written, this little conversation, in which the by-now beleaguered Allington tries and fails to seek the answers to his own inner doubts and questions and is, unexpectedly, given a hint - a hint that would lead him to "believe" against all odds and be convinced of the inevitability of the same. Amis, Martin (2002). Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million. Talk Miramax Books. ISBN 978-1400032204. Neal Ascherson, "Red Souls", London Review of Books, Vol. 2, No. 10, May 1980. Retrieved 20 June 2019.

They were all talking … but quietened down and stared into their drinks when they saw me, out of respect for the bereaved, or the insane.” As the tension grows, so does Maurice; he passes through various stages of awakening to the truth of himself and another world. Underhill, as a doppelgänger, is evidence that evil is a real and active presence in the world and not just a concoction of the mind. His ghost is also a means by which Amis can credibly account for the forces that seek Maurice’s destruction—all that afflicts, mystifies, and weighs on him. In 2008, The Times ranked Amis 13th on its list of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945. [23] [24] Personal life [ edit ] Political views [ edit ] Amis is widely known as a comic novelist of life in mid- to late-20th-century Britain, but his literary work covered many genres – poetry, essays, criticism, short stories, food and drink, anthologies, and several novels in genres such as science fiction and mystery. His career initially developed in an inverse pattern to that of his close friend Philip Larkin. Before becoming known as a poet, Larkin had published two novels; Amis originally sought to be a poet and turned to novels only after publishing several volumes of verse. He continued throughout his career to write poetry in a straightforward, accessible style that often masks a nuance of thought. In June 1941, Amis joined the Communist Party of Great Britain. [11] He broke with communism in 1956, in view of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's denunciation of Joseph Stalin in his speech " On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences". [12] In July 1942, he was called up for national service and served in the Royal Corps of Signals. He returned to Oxford in October 1945 to complete his degree. Although he worked hard and earned a first in English in 1947, he had decided by then to give much of his time to writing.