Mine ghost
CLEMENT FREUD
The Green Man Kingsley Amis (Cape 30s) One reads now and then of elderly ladies who write travel books about Patagonia when they themselves have never ventured south of Eastbourne.
In The Green Man Mr Kingsley. Amis —who has probably been to Patagonia— writes a first person singular account of one Maurice Allington—an innkeeper. Allington is a womanising, whisky-swilling, orgy- orientated Cambridge graduate with a dicky heart and a dreadful hang-up about the A10, A595 and A507—which I accept. But why he should think that he can keep an inn astonishes me. His wife drinks ho Pepe—a non-pro drink if ever I heard of one; his father smokes Piccadilly cigarettes in tens and he goes around the restaurant up to the gills with the hard stuff 'pushing the incipiently elderly pork.'
I have seen Lady Chatterley's Lover re- viewed in The Gatnekeepers Monthly (they did not think much of it and would hate to make the same mistake. Basically this is less of an innkeeper's diary than a book about ghosts, predominantly that of one Tom Underhill, upon whose shallow grave Allington has it off with the doctor's wife.
That is how it is. Women and whisky and ghosts" and guests. Shopping and fornicating and recommending the pressed tongue and drinking to such an extent that each time he sees an apparition one turns back the pages to work out the extent of his alcoholic intake. There is, if I got it right, a Red Haired Woman who is either a ghost or a customer of 'The Green Man'; Allington lurches around the upper floors of his establishment seeing her, then not seeing her, embarrassing his friends, family and clientele by asking whether they too saw her. He feels, as do most good nuts, that a vision shared is a vision proved. In one of the upstairs rooms he has an unhappy daughter, which figures, as they say in America, but his wife comes across as being an utterly unreal lady. He has her only once in 253 pages. (the day his father
); it is hardly surprising that when he ally sets up an orgy between his mistress
d his spouse he is so slow taking off his Ales that by the time he is stripped for lion the two ladies are inseparably en- "led. Poor sozzled Allington, who was king forward to this for several chapters, down and has another whisky, and sees other ghost and consults a man con- iently called Duerinckx-Williams (the t of name after which one would always ‘e to write 'sic).
if you like a book in blue dustcovers that s prose of the quality of 'Some of the pie round about said that Underhill had lied his wife, whom he used to quarrel ith a lot, apparently, and he was also pposed to have brought about the death
f a farmer he'd had trouble with over some nd', then this might well be for you. rsonally I found the one man to emerge th any sort of integrity was the assistant anager; throughout his employer's bouts boozing and ghost-spotting this model n kept the customers content and coming ,s for more. Even when he opened a .ile of white wine half an hour before the J. he was blameless. Allington had told
n to do so.
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