"The Green Man" is a ghost story. Maurice Allington owns and operates the Green Man Inn. It's supposed to be haunted, but ghosts haven't been seen since Victorian times.

Maurice spends most of his time avoiding the people in his life--his father, his emotionally detached wife, Joyce, and his lonely daughter, Amy. He does have time, however, to initiate a sexual relationship with Diana, the bored, talkative wife of the local doctor.

As Maurice begins increasingly detached from his domestic life, he begins to "see" things--including the ghost of Dr. Thomas Underhill--a 17th Century villian who may or may not committed 2 ghastly murders.

Unfortunately, no-one believes Maurice's sightings, and it does seem up for grabs whether or not Maurice is hallucinating or whether this is all just the result of Maurice's alcoholic binges.

Underhill seems to have a message for Maurice, and, unable to resist, Maurice takes the bait and begins to unravel the Underhill mystery in a detective style.

Maurice is a marvellous Amis character--lacking the self-deprecating humour and comic talents of Jim Dixon in "Lucky Jim," Maurice is weaker and not as likeable. Nonetheless, the hand of Amis is clearly visible.

The book was gripping at times and amusing at others. I laughed and laughed when Maurice attempts to set up "The Orgy" between Joyce, Diana, and, of course, himself! I loved the way he tried to introduce the subject to his wife--in spite of the fact that he receives ample warning signals to the contrary. If you enjoy this book, I can heartily recommend "Lucky Jim"--another brilliant Amis novel.

I've never been much of a gothic horror fan, but The Green Man is a good old-fashioned gothic, without the ... cliche heroine having to get rescued by the hero. Maurice Allington has been chosen by the ghost of Dr. Underhill -- a sinister gentleman who practiced black magic and discovered how to beat death -- to become the enabler who brings Underhill back from beyond the grave.

Allington -- a boozer whose ghost-sightings are written off as hallucinations by just about everyone he knows -- is the proprietor of The Green Man, a small English inn. A pitiable character, Allington is going through somewhat of a mid-life crisis. He is mentally unstable, and much of the story convincingly shows us a man who is living on the borderline between a disappointing world that he can't handle sober, and a frighteningly confusing one in which he must remain in control lest he truly lose his mind.

Through snatches of conversations with the ghost of the Doctor and with a dashing young man who just so happens to be the embodiment of a bemused and slightly cynical God, Allington is brought to discover the power that both good and evil can wield from beyond the physical world that he knows.

I must warn you that I had some crazy dreams on nights that I stayed up late reading this book before bedtime. Much of the novel's suspense is psychological, and since Amis' formal style of writing can be cumbersome at times, you may find yourself reading passages two or three times to undertand fully the nuances and foreshadows within.

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

Lucky Jim takes an amazingly cynical, yet hilarious view at academic culture! This book shows how funny it can be when people take themselves too seriously. You can't help but laugh out loud while reading it.

It's a good story for those sick of overdramatization without intelligenge. Some things get a little bit out of hand, but only the wittiest survive.

stories by Kipling, Ambrose Bierce, M R James, Chesterton, Joyce, Maugham, Irwin Shaw, Wodehouse, Nabokov, Angus Wilson, Anthony Boucher, Brian Aldiss, H. Beam Piper, Elizabeth Taylor, and Dick Francis.

I've read a lot of Amis over the years, and I think that this
hilarious little book may well be his masterpiece.

It tells the not-so-simple story of the five retirees who live in
Hapenny-Tupenny cottage, ending up their lives in the company of
people they hardly knew at all in their working years.

Adela Bastable is the matriarch, a touching figure who has never
been loved, and who has never even been permitted to love.
("This she explained to herself as the result of her extreme
ugliness.") Adela's brother Bernard is the misanthropic hero
of the novel, a man who was forced to resign his Army commission
shortly after his disastrous marriage by a "scandalous" relationship with
Private Derrick Shortell, who is the third inhabitant of Hapenny-Tupenny Cottage;
known as "Shorty," he is the most important financial mainstay
of the household, its general factotum and servant, and almost never sober.
Marigold Pyke, a pretentious, vapid old flirt in her seventies,
and Professor George Zeyer, a crippled Central European academic
suffering from nominal aphasia, round out the cast.

Oh, do they ever have fun! Every incident of every day is
the occasion for new plotting and counter-plotting. Adela
tries to keep everything functional and warm; Bernard tries
for the very opposite, particularly with regard to Marigold;
Shorty tries to keep his supply of drink secret and safe, and
wages mild, unrelenting war against his social "superiors;"
Marigold tries to convince everyone that she is still a
beauty -- and not inexorably losing her memory;
George simply struggles to speak.

Of course, they are all headed for the grave sooner or later,
like everyone else, but one of the many brilliant strokes in
this novel is showing us how they all unwittingly rush towards
that fate much sooner than anyone could have imagined --
and that this early exit is inextricably bound up with their characters.
So this comic novel winds up being
(in some sense) a pocket tragedy, as the characters
relentlessly move towards the fate ordained by their own character.

I sometimes wonder if this novel wouldn't make a truly dazzling,
one-of-a-kind film. Of course, it would need very courageous
and very capable acting talent, bringing "ensemble acting" to a
new height. And it probably wouldn't make a lot of money, but --
so what?? :-)

The prose in this book is impeccable and lapidary, right up there
with the best efforts of H.H. Munro (Saki), Ernest Brahmah, and
Alexander Kinglake.

Highest possible recommendation!!

Kingsley Amis writes in the breezy style of a good English gent, on a subject about which he has much knowledge and even more experience--boozemanship. This series of short articles provides an authoritative statement on what to drink and how to drink it, along with with a hefty jigger of Amis's profoundly hilarious sense of understatement.

There is a lot of good stuff in this book which you may have never seen before -- or may never see again, anywhere else. One item alone is worth the whole price of admission: G.K. Chesterton's "Variations On A Theme," where he gives the venerable "Old King Cole" chestnut a series of treatments -- after Lord Tennyson, after Yeats, after Walt Whitman (!), and after Swinburne. They are, all of them, utterly hilarious, and I don't know another place to find them!

Many more treats lurk within!

Rare is the book that leaves one red-eyed with laughter. Rarer still the book that turns the same embarrassing trick (I try to avoid reading this book in public), after a dozen dog-eared readings. The aging Weavers, also-ran poet Alun and trophy-wife Rhiannon, return to a small Welsh hornet's nest after fair-to-middling success in London. Rakish Alun, with enough of his hair left to engender envy, but lacking the stature that would safely have hoisted him above the slings and arrows of envy's snipery, is asking for it. Kingsley Amis (the millionaire's father), apparently as cynical a wit as ever there was, masters his prose as well as he shepherds his readers' use of it, wise to the fact that no fool is half so funny as a loved one. The reader is made to love the titular devils, logy duffers all, of "The Old Devils", giving the lie to the very concept of so-called "identity fiction" (i.e.: WASPS prefer reading about WASPS; Gay Blacks about Gay Blacks). These doddering Welsh cranks could hardly be less like this particular reader, but Amis fits their false teeth in my mouth and wedges their swollen ankles into my shoes with clubby, back-patting authority. Peer through his microscope into this acre or two of Wales and you will be jarred with a salutary sight: life as we know it. He was an old enough devil himself to pull the trick off. (That there also seem present autiographical clues to Amis' own less-than-placid second marriage is beneath our concern, correct?)

Over the years, there have been many attempts to establish a
"Deep Inner Meaning" for "Lucky Jim," but I wouldn't pay them
much attention if I were you. "Lucky Jim" is simply a hilarious
book. For me, it was a revelation -- I had no idea that a book
might leave me with my sides aching, weak from laughter, yet
ready to laugh again, as I recalled the phrase or the incident
which had initially tickled my funny-bone.

One reason the book is so funny is that it gores some very
Sacred Cows. In its time, those sacred bovines very definitely
included provincial academics who were seriously into
Elizabethan madrigals and recorder concerts; Amis had the
genius to see these daffy eccentrics for the incredibly comic
figures they really were. Even more outrageously, the novel's
hero gets the girl of his dreams and escapes the dreary provinces
for a happy career in London, by abandoning the academic life
and going into (are you sitting down?) BUSINESS. Into... TRADE.
It is hard to imagine anything more non-U.

In short, a masterpiece of comic English prose!

Highest possible recommendation!!!

When it was first published in 1954, it turned the author, Kingsley Amis (the father of Martin, also a fine author), into a celebrated writer and a spokesman for his generation, a position that he didn't seem to want or care about. The novel was "Lucky Jim," and it tells the story of a young academic, Jim Dixon, at work in one of England's provincial universities. The book is hilarious, from the first page (where Jim describes the physical sensation of hangover) to the last, when he leaves the shady groves of academia for a job with better pay in London. Along the way, Jim learns a lot about academic life--he hates recorder concerts, musical evenings, and academic pretentions--and he learns a lot of girls; his main preoccupation. I keep thinking this book is ripe for a movie version, with someone like Daniel Day-Lewis as the title character; it was made into a film in the 1950s, but I've never seen it and the reviews are not great. The book remains a delight to read, however, and, like all good satires, has some serious points to make, about things that Amis detected, like pretentiousness. "Lucky Jim" is also noteworthy because it launched Amis's career, and he wrote novels, short stories, poems, and journalism for the rest of his life, which ended just last year. He's a very different writer from his son Martin (rumor has it he didn't like Martin's work all that much), but they both share a real gift for comic writing. It is a work that achieves that rare combination of being interesting in a literary sense, but also humorous and a real pleasure to read. I recommend it heartily.

Lucky Jim remains one of the funniest books I have ever read, and Jim Dixon one of the most engaging anti-heroes. Sure, the book is a little dated in terms of the society it satirizes, but so what? Jim is still hilarious, Neddy Welch is still a pompous old fool who gets what he deserves, Margaret is the attention-seeking neurotic we've all met, and Tristram is still odious and still instantly recognizable in any self-consciously "arty" group. I love Jim's story--he is lucky, but he deserves his luck more than most. Amis wrote a very funny book that has held its ground, despite the vast social and economic changes that have taken place since Lucky Jim was written, because he targets human foibles and pretensions that men (and women) will always be prey to.

Kingsley Amis is best known as a satirist -- Lucky Jim is one of the funniest books since World War II -- but he always had an interest in science fiction (according to his son Martin, one of his favorite movies was The Terminator), and this book presents an alternative history in which Britain remained a Catholic country, and Martin Luther was reconciled to the Church. Other changes including Bethoven writing 20 symphonies and Mozart dying even earlier than in real life. The main character is a boy (Hubert) about to lose his voice because of puberty; the "alteration" of the title is castration to preserve that voice. Amis presents a well-thought out altenrate version, and the adventures of Hubert to escape his alteration are both interesting and used to further explain this alternative history. Unfortunately, the book is out of print in the U.S.; I got my copy on a trip to Britain. Almost anything Kingsley Amis wrote is interesting, and it is our loss that more of his works are not available in the U.S.

Stanley Duke's teenage son, Steve, has gone mad. Stan is a perplexed misogynist surrounded by women - ex-wife Nowell, Trish (Steve's doctor), his wife Susan and her snotty mother. Trish, as she treats Steve, thinks and speaks in a voguish but threatening psychobabble. The diatribes of Stan and his mates against this inability to call a madman a madman - indeed, all offences against common sense - and against the strangeness of 'females' provide the most enjoyment - a coherent but increasingly extreme rage. Stan finally loses all faith in women - and Steve ends the story as mad as he began. Rating 64.2%

"Stanley and the Women" is a lot darker than other Amis novels. The protagonist, Stanley Duke, is a man with a lot of problems--he drinks too much, has a rather unpleasant ex-wife, self-centered, shallow actress, Nowell, a cold and brittle second wife, Susan, and a son, Steve, who goes mad one day.

Steve has always been an "underachiever." But one night, he shows up dishevelled, disoriented and mumbling something about alien invasions. While Steve descends into madness, Stanley battles with the psychiatric branch of the National Health Service. Ping-ponging between diagnoses, hospital politics, prevailing therapy theories, and psychiatrists (who--in terms of mental competency--are indistinguishable from the patients), Stanley tries to maintain the domestic status quo.

Reading this book reminded me, once again, why I love literature. This was not an upbeat or humourous read ("Lucky Jim"), but, nonetheless, I found Stanley's memories of losing a childhood acquaintance profoundly moving. How this early experience then shaped Stanley's attitudes towards the medical profession was intricately woven into the tale. The idea that one incident from childhood can set a pattern, or attitude for life gave me food for thought, and also caused me to remember a similiar incident from my own childhood that I had not thought about for many years.