Description:
Maurice Allington has reached middle age and is haunted by death. As he says, "I honestly can't see why everybody who isn't a child, everybody who's theoretically old enough to have understood what death means, doesn't spend all his time thinking about it. It's a pretty arresting thought." He also happens to own and run a country inn that is haunted. The Green Man opens as Maurice's father drops dead (had he seen something in the room?) and continues as friends and family convene for the funeral.
Maurice's problems are many and increasing: How to deal with his own declining health? How to reach out to a teenage daughter who watches TV all the time? How to get his best friend's wife in the sack? How to find another drink? (And another.) And then there is always death.
The Green Man is a ghost story that hits a live nerve, a very black comedy with an uncannily happy ending: in other words, Kingsley Amis at his best.
Brief description:
Kingsley (William) Amis, novelist, poet, and critic, took his MA at Oxford and was a lecturer in English at Swansea and Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge. A satirist and debunker of note, he is best known for such social comedies as his first novel, Lucky Jim (1954), but also saw science fiction as an ideal medium for satirical and sociological extrapolation. Amis' controversial artistic evolution from supposed radical to national institution was neatly summed up by his receipt of a knighthood in 1990.
Review Quotes:
"The Green Man is an extremely funny book, filled with slapstick, parody and satire. Indeed, the success of this short novel depends very much on the balance that Amis maintains between fear and laughter.''
-- "New York Times"