Books: Mr. Spleen

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THE GREEN MAN by Kingsley Amis. 252 pages. Harcourt, Brace & World. $5.95.

After a decade writing what he calls "the more or less straight novel," Kingsley Amis migrated a few years ago toward science fiction (The Anti-Death League) and the James Bond spy thriller (Colonel Sun), written under the pseudonym of Robert Markham. Now, in The Green Man, he has drifted into the ghost story. What is Amis up to?

Partly he is seeking a form where it is still necessary to practice the old, unfashionable rites of careful plotting, factual scene setting and crisp narrative. The Green Man, though, is like an Amis novel with ghosts. Its tensions are dissipated at crucial moments by cold dashes of caustic humor. Its focus is blurred by a few too many themes and incidents. But it remains pretty high-grade Amis.

The protagonist is a late-model Amis antihero, middle-age division, of the type first launched in One Fat Englishman. Irascible and hypochondriacal, Maurice Allington runs The Green Man pub outside London, drinks a quart of Scotch a day and spends a lot of his time scheming to get his wife and his best friend's wife into bed with him at the same time. Maurice is a little short on charm, but any man with some of his phobias—sour white wines, sweet feminine conversations, more-secular-than-thou swinging clerics—can't be all bad. His pub, like many in England, has a legendary ghost, a 17th century scholar and necromancer who conjured a leafy monster to life in the backyard for purposes of terror and mayhem. Naturally, both ghost and monster turn out to be more than a legend.

When the ghost becomes really threatening, God intervenes and pays a call on Maurice. Yes, God—in the form of a pale, silky-haired young man with a "not very trustworthy face." Thoroughly shaken, Maurice reels on to an equivocal denouement. His dream of a sexual threesome is achieved with disastrous domestic consequences. He eventually exorcises the ghost but is left haunted hy what he sees when he looks in the mirror. "Death was my only means of getting away for good," he reflects, "from the constant awareness of this body, from this person, with his ruthlessness and sentimentality and ineffective, insincere, impracticable notions of behaving better."

Crikey! God, Death, Self-Loathing —it is testimony to Amis' sophistication that he can encompass all these without ceasing to be funny. Mortality in all its implications, in fact, seems to have grown into his prime comic theme. It is a rich one, and a book like The Green Man, while not wholly satisfying in itself, suggests that Amis is going to be able to do remarkable things with it. One English critic has even maintained that Amis is turning into a satirist whose target is the biggest establishment of them all: creation as a whole. Amis is a foe of such cosmic statements. But he admits that he aspires to a form of "seriocomedy," a combination of "dark stuff with high spirits."