Mr. Spleen

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."

Whatever this leads to, it undoubtedly will make people mad. Nearly everything about Amis does. One sizable body of readers has never forgiven him for not devoting his career to rewriting other versions of Lucky Jim, an understandable complaint considering the skill and savage glee with which that book skewered bores, snobs and all the petty conspiracies of circumstance that can stand in the way of a fellow simply getting on with a job, a girl, a few drinks.

An even more sizable group of critics has never forgiven Amis for not actually being Lucky Jim, or at least for not staying in the cheerful anti-Establishment camp. At 48, though, Amis' days as a Jim Dixonish university lecturer in the provinces, fighting a roaming guerrilla action against the Tory way of life, are far behind. Well off, he lives in a Georgian mansion on the outskirts of London. As with several of the once radical talents who emerged with him in the '50s--John Osborne and John Braine particularly--his public pronouncements now have a distinctly crusty edge. This is Amis as Mr. Spleen, railing against the pervasive influence of "lefties." He takes a hard line on Communism and is a hawkish backer of the U.S. in Viet Nam. He bemoans the decline of intellectual elitism in English education, attacking the expansion of university enrollments with the slogan "More will mean worse."

Cultural Pretension. Amis compounds his provocations by being a highbrow-baiter. This is Amis as the thinking man's Philistine, going to perverse lengths to deflate cultural pretension. He admires science fiction, horror movies and jazz (but not modern jazz). He will take the position that Jane Austen had a defective moral sense and Keats an awkward poetic technique. He has written that Detective-Novelist John D. MacDonald "is by any standards a better writer than Saul Bellow."

Slightly mislabeled as angry in his more buoyant youth, he is widely accused of complacency now that he is truly irate in middle age. "I am denounced as a traitor to the left." he says. "Actually, I've stood still. If Lucky Jim were alive today, he'd be concentrating on putting down student demonstrators. He always attacked the trendy and the orthodox. In his day, those things were on the right; now they're on the left."

-- Christopher Porterfleld

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