And did I say the main character is an alcoholic? In fact, I’ll call this one of the “alcoholic novels,” like Under the Volcano by Malcom Lowry. Here are a couple of lines:

But its inspiration, a literary myth, DID help. Enormously. And this ancient story about another green man proved to illustrate the trajectory of my later life, when I had finally learned to bend in compassion. Amis was raised at Norbury – in his later estimation "not really a place, it's an expression on a map ... really I should say I came from Norbury station." [8] Having been educated first at St Hilda's, an "undistinguished, long-vanished local school ... an independent girls' school of the kind which also took small boys, before they became pubescent and dangerous", he then moved to nearby Norbury College. [9] Kingsley Amis is an important writer, and we cannot afford to lose him. It is no small thing to have written a good ghost story; to have written a ghost story that is also a major novel is nothing short of miraculous.” I felt rather strung up, and was on a bottle of scotch a day, but this had been standard for twenty years.” The end of the sixties of the last century… What may that mean? It means the sexual revolution, an increased interest in occult subjects and mysticism and desire to change the state of mind with all sorts of psychotropic stuffs.

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This is a pretty conventional ghost story, replete with a mysterious tome in which Maurice learns all sorts of dark secrets about the history of The Green Man Inn. The genre bits feel sandwiched in-between the numerous sex scenes and ruminative speculations on fate, destiny and the search for the perfect orgasm (which seems to be Maurice’s interpretation of enlightenment). Anthony Julius, Trials of the Diaspora, A History of Anti-Semitism in England, Oxford University Press, 2010, pp. 357–358.

You see, in medieval myth, a Green Man is the symbol of the Devil. Amis' Green Man is in the fantasies of a drunken and morally besotted manager of an English B & B, and the Green Man eventually seizes the man's soul (or at least that inference is there for us Christians). How rarely do we come across the really frightening ghost story now. Kingsley Amis’s The Green Man was a rare and honourable exception, and Amis followed the classic pattern of earlier writers, letting the story progress carefully from a recognisable normality, through unease, to the rapid unfolding of horror that marks out the most successful and scarifying of all horror story writers.”The owner of a haunted country inn contends with death, fatherhood, romantic woes, and alcoholism in this humorous and “rattling good ghost story” from a Booker Prize–winning author ( The New York Times ) Norwich, John Julius (1990). Oxford Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Arts. USA: Oxford University Press. p.15. ISBN 978-0198691372. Yet according to James, Amis reached a turning point when his drinking ceased to be social and became a way of dulling his remorse and regret at his behaviour towards Hilly. "Amis had turned against himself deliberately.... It seems fair to guess that the troubled grandee came to disapprove of his own conduct." [35] His friend Christopher Hitchens said: "The booze got to him in the end, and robbed him of his wit and charm as well as of his health." [37] Antisemitism [ edit ] In 1963, Hilary discovered that Amis was having an affair with the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard. Hilary and Amis separated in August and he went to live with Howard, divorcing Hilary and marrying Howard in 1965. In 1968 he moved with Howard to Lemmons, a house in Barnet, north London. She and Amis divorced in 1983. a b Mira Stout. "Martin Amis: Down London's Mean Streets", The New York Times Book Review, 4 February 1990. Sunday, Late Edition – Final Section 6; p. 32, Column 1; Magazine Desk.

This matched a disciplined approach to writing. For "many years" Amis imposed a rigorous daily schedule on himself, segregating writing and drink. Mornings were spent on writing, with a minimum daily output of 500 words. [36] Drinking began about lunchtime, when this had been achieved. Such self-discipline was essential to Amis's prodigious output.

Success!

In 1940, the Amises moved to Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, and Amis (like his father before him) won a scholarship to the City of London School. [10] In April 1941, after his first year, he was admitted on a scholarship to St John's College, Oxford, where he read English. There he met Philip Larkin, with whom he formed the most important friendship of his life. [11] I'd never read anything by Kingsley Amis and I now know that this book was out of the ordinary for him. He was known as a cynical, yet amusing writer, with a unique take on the world and people around him. This is supposedly his only book of this kind. (He also wrote a sci-fi, though his usual genre was sarcasm and humor.) Anyhow, I might try another of his novels... In his pursuit and eventual destruction of Underhill and the monster, Maurice gains self-knowledge. He begins to realize that his “affinity” to Underhill has taken many guises. Maurice has reduced people to mere objects, beings manipulated and controlled by a more powerful master, just as Underhill controlled his monster. For Underhill, further, sex and aggression and striving for immortality are all bound up together; it becomes clear, as Maurice struggles with the evil spirit, that the same holds true for him.

The novel also has some fun sexcapades, including Maurice’s ridiculous attempt to get his wife Joyce into a threesome with his best friend’s wife, Diana. Amis’s characters always seem to have plenty of attention from women but they always find a way to mess things up. Amis never really bothers to give his women any depth generally painting them merely as sex objects. Maurice Allington is not the kind of guy you want to get mixed up with—he may be the well-known proprietor of the inn The Green Man, but he drinks far too much, ignores his wife and daughter, and spends his free time propositioning his friend’s wife. When he starts seeing things around the inn, we have to wonder if his drinking has finally addled his wits, for Maurice certainly doesn’t believe in the ghosts that he advertises to lure guests. I remember a TV show based on this book, which I skipped based on how much the ads for it disturbed my peace of mind. Maybe I should have watched, because the book didn’t bother me a bit! I found Maurice to be completely unreliable as a narrator of his own experience—too alcohol impaired to be trusted—and since no one else shares in his visions/delusions, I was able to control my imaginative faculties and remain calm. As Maurice reflects a one point, “I thought to myself how much more welcome a faculty the imagination would be if we could tell when it was at work and when not.” But mine doesn’t work that way—it is often overactive when I would like it to mind its own business. What makes The Green Man readable and re-readable is the skill with which Amis, like Henry James before him, turns the narrative screw. It is, quite simply, a rattling good ghost story. In the drunken, lecherous, God-fearing Maurice Allingham, the drunken, lecherous, God-loathing Kingsley Amis created a character who makes sin and redemption far more real and natural than they appear in the works of most professedly Christian novelists.

Amis became associated with Ian Fleming's James Bond novels, which he admired, in the late 1960s, when he began composing critical works connected with Bond, either under a pseudonym or uncredited. In 1965, he wrote the popular James Bond Dossier under his own name. The same year, he wrote The Book of Bond, or, Every Man His Own 007, a tongue-in-cheek how-to manual about being a sophisticated spy, under the pseudonym "Lt Col. William ('Bill') Tanner", Tanner being M's chief of staff in many of Fleming's novels. In 1968 Amis wrote Colonel Sun, which was published under the pseudonym " Robert Markham". The discovery of Underhill’s power brings Maurice to a deeper consideration of the question of survival after death and prepares him for a conversation with still another supernatural agent, of quite a different kind from Underhill. Amis personifies God as a character in his own right, in the guise of a young man who expresses puzzlement and a certain degree of helplessness over the events unfolding in the world of his creation. Maurice’s transformation from an alienated man to an unwitting hero who chooses to take on the responsibilities of an absentee God forms the dramatic core of the novel. In the drunken, lecherous, God-fearing Maurice Allingham, the drunken, lecherous, God-loathing Kingsley Amis created a character who makes sin and redemption far more real and natural than they appear in the works of most professedly Christian novelists.”