The Green Man by Kingsley Amis

First published: 1969

Type of work: Ghost story

Time of work: The late 1960’s

Locale: Fareham, in Hertfordshire, and Cambridge, some twenty miles away

Principal Characters:

• Maurice Allington, the narrator, the innkeeper of The Green Man
• Joyce, his second wife
• Amy, his daughter by his deceased first wife
• Diana Maybury, the wife of Allington’s doctor, with whom Allington conducts an affair
• Dr. Thomas Underhill, one of the ghosts who haunt The Green Man
• The young Man, a character not otherwise identified, seemingly an apparition of God

The Novel

The Green Man is the story of a haunting and an exorcism. Its action takes place in The Green Man, an English pub not far from Cambridge, which harbors at least three apparitions: the harmless and ineffective ghost of Mrs. Underhill, allegedly murdered by her husband by supernatural means some time in the 1680’s; Dr. Thomas Underhill himself, a malignant ghost still trying to cause harm from beyond the grave; and the Green Man, a spirit (or force) which can take physical form from trees and bushes and so carry out the murderous wishes of its director. Yet although all these “facts” have been made clear and accepted by the end of the story, they are at the beginning naturally no more than allegations, faced by the deep skepticism of characters and at least a majority of readers. The main difficulty of the novelist writing a ghost story in the late twentieth century is to persuade his audience that superstitions from the past can coexist with a well-imagined and realistic present.

Kingsley Amis achieves this in several skillful and unexpected ways. To begin with, the “real world” is always strongly present in the novel. While Maurice Allington grapples with ghosts and visions, he is always simultaneously coping with a demanding job (taking bookings, pacifying staff, checking and collecting deliveries) and with a sequence of personal crises (mainly the death and burial of his father, but also a withdrawn teenage daughter and a second wife who is reluctant to act as a business partner and stepmother). Weird events, then, are firmly embedded in prosaic context.

Allington, the narrator, furthermore reacts to the hauntings in much the same way as he reacts to everything else, with strong feelings of frustration. The frustration in this case is caused by the fact that he cannot assemble any proof of any of the events that happen. At least a dozen times in the book Allington sees a ghost or undergoes a supernatural experience of one kind or another— the way in which these are varied and built up to a climax being one of the novel’s major successes. Yet the event is never unequivocally shared by any other person. Allington’s increasingly desperate attempts to find some tangible proof, some object which will guarantee that he is telling the truth, both make the reader aware that Allington is not a fanciful character and raise the interesting question of what can be considered “proof” of any subjective experience.

Surrounding the main protagonist is a whole set of doubtful and skeptical characters, whom Amis allows to be won over slowly to Allington’s side. Preeminent in this role is Lucy, his daughter-in-law, called to The Green Man for the family funeral. She is trained in philosophy, and on several occasions refines and comments on Allington’s accounts. It is a good stroke to make her and her father-in-law hostile to each other not only over ghosts but also temperamentally; this means that as Lucy starts to concede, out of sheer intellectual honesty, that her father-in-law could be telling a sort of truth and cannot be instantly disproved, the reader takes this as a genuine admission. Other minor and major characters in the novel take on similar roles. Yet there is no doubt that appearances always remain against Allington. A final complication to a plot based on the incommunicability of experience is that Allington is well on the way to becoming an alcoholic. At least three of his ghost sightings coincide closely with drunken blackouts. He admits to having nonsupernatural hallucinations. One of his major fears, throughout the novel, is that he is not seeing ghosts at all but is going mad.

All these tensions give credibility and complexity to a plot based on the notion that a man nearly three centuries dead is trying, not exactly to come back, but to reenact former sadistic pleasures by taking over a weary, middle-aged innkeeper who might be expected to be full of his own concerns. A final surprise in The Green Man, though, is that Allington and Underhill are connected by more than coincidence.

The Characters

There is in a sense only one fully realized character in The Green Man, and that is the narrator. Since he tells the story, the reader tends naturally to side with him, amused by his repeated furies over careless staff, boring conversations, and tedious television programs. Events, though, start to turn against Allington quite soon, and especially over sexuality. Allington is highly sexed, by reputation and in fact, and early in the novel succeeds in seducing Diana Maybury, his doctor’s wife, a woman he quite clearly despises. The reader may go along with his own feelings of delight and triumph on this occasion; but doubts begin to surface as Allington goes straight on from this success to try to organize an “orgy” involving himself, his wife, and Diana simultaneously, and perhaps with even more force as the reader comes to realize that Allington has no insight into Diana’s psychology at all. She hates her husband; everybody else remarks that this is obvious, yet Allington has never noticed. He is very good, in short, at persuading other people, very bad at observing them. Although he appears sympathetic, is he not in fact a cynical manipulator?

If so, that may be one reason why the evil Underhill has decided to exert pressure on him rather than on any previous owner of the house. Underhill’s psychology is revealed through a diary which Allington locates and reads in a college library at Cambridge University, and it is based first on a desire to survive after death but second on a preoccupation with sexual experiment, leading easily to sadism. Allington is not a sadist, but he is an experimenter. He also has a teenage daughter, who seems to be a further reason for Underhill’s interest. The climactic division and opposition between Underhill and Allington comes when the latter, who has retrieved an image from Underhill’s coffin which can call up the demonic Green Man, realizes that all this has been aimed at his daughter, lured out of her bed at night for the Green Man to kill and Underhill to watch. Allington immediately rebels, but even after he has drawn off the Green Man and saved Amy, he is uneasily aware that what he thought was a kind of scientific inquiry may in reality have been prompted by motives not far removed from Underhill’s vicious sadism and his own sexual experimentation—a sort of excited curiosity.

Allington in the end remains difficult to judge. There is much to be said against him. He is a drunkard, a womanizer, a habitual deceiver with little interest in others; his first wife had good reason to leave him, as does his second, Joyce, at the very end of the novel. On the other hand, he feels guilt over the deaths of his first wife and his father (neither in any way his fault), means well, is capable of kindness, and is also totally determined when it comes to resisting Underhill and the Green Man and getting rid of them both via exorcism—a process in which he has, once again, and this time perfectly forgivably, to use his old skills in manipulation and deceit. The characters round him, it should finally be said, all like Allington, however clear they are about his failings. In better circumstances, one believes, he might be a better man.

Critical Context

The Green Man can be seen in one way as a late example of the “ghost story,” a subgenre brought to perfection, in many opinions, in the tales of M. R. James (1862-1936). Amis’ novel shows several resemblances to these, not least in its grasp of period detail and in its careful setting of one major scene within a college library. (James was provost of King’s College, Cambridge, and frequently used his immense knowledge of paleography in his fiction.) It is a great technical achievement to have added to this framework at least three elements quite alien to the “Jamesian” story, namely sexuality, individual characterization, and skepticism.

The point of doing this can, however, only be grasped in terms of Amis’ own development. In this context, The Green Man shows Amis’ increasing disenchantment with political themes, his alienation from the highly politicized scene of the late 1960’s, and his conviction that the truly serious concern of the novel ought to be one’s ability to develop and hold a personal philosophy in the face of organized disbelief and the erosion of all moral standards.

That is Allington’s success. He does win through to a kind of creed, even after his interview with the “young man”; he recovers his daughter, both physically and emotionally. The major achievement of The Green Man is to rescue conviction from the jaws of skepticism, fear, and nihilism. It may usefully be compared with several other novels by Amis on the themes of age, death, and deity, particularly The Anti-Death League (1966), Ending Up (1975), and The Alteration (1976).

Bibliography

“Drunk and the Dead,” in The Times Literary Supplement. October 9, 1969, p. 1145.

Gardner, Philip. Kingsley Amis, 1981.

Salwak, Dale. Kingsley Amis: A Reference Guide, 1978.