What If Your Favorite Character Is a Terrible Person?

I finished Kingsley Amis’s The Green Man a few weeks ago but I can’t stop thinking about it. So, I guess I’ll have to write about it.

As someone relatively new to Amis, I wasn’t sure what to expect when I picked up the book at my local bookstore. It was a nice hardcover with a dust jacket, which is perhaps why I picked it up to read it so soon after purchase. I love pretty books. (Would I have been so mesmerized by the book if it hadn’t been so nice to hold?)

The Green Man is the story of Maurice Allington, a man who is at once cultivated, drunken, sophisticated, fastidious, lecherous, refined, social, and self-contained.

Allington is the innkeeper of The Green Man Inn, where he juggles the demands of shrewd restaurant management with the needs of family - an aged father, rebellious teenage daughter, a young and attractive second wife. Allington is the ultimate functional alcoholic - he operates smoothly in public, bolstered by glasses of scotch sneaked in private from the kitchen and the pantry throughout the day. Allington’s life is a delicately balanced Jenga tower - and that’s before the complications begin.

For one, there’s sex. Allington is a compulsive womanizer, and his obvious attraction to his own young wife doesn’t limit his instincts in the least. His roving eye quickly falls on the pretty wife of his doctor, and when she reciprocates, he isn’t satiated, but instead obsesses over a hair-brained scheme to set up a threesome with her and his wife.

But more pressing and urgent even than this is the sudden intrusion of the supernatural. The Green Man, like many old inns, has its ghosts, but when Allington first starts seeing them, he’s not sure whether they’re real or simply visions conjured by alcoholic delirium tremens. But alcoholic though he is, Allington isn’t an imaginative type - supremely practical, he quickly and efficiently confirms that the ghosts are real, and not only that, they are malignant and on the move.

Particularly threatening is the ghost of a 17th-century sexual deviant and practitioner of the dark arts, Dr. Thomas Underhill, suspected of two hideous murders. Without spoilers, I can say that The Green Man is a page-turner full of murder, mayhem, graveyard coffin-robbing, and monsters both human and supernatural. It’s also very funny, and extremely well-written. Evelyn Waugh has nothing on Kingsley Amis for prose style and humor. But it’s the main character that drives the book.

Through it all, Maurice Allington holds it together, drunk or sober. Like James Bond or Jeeves, he is unflappable and equal to every occasion. It’s truly remarkable for a man driven by destructive compulsions. The character is just unusual enough to have the ring of truth about it - Kingsley Amis was in fact a womanizer and a drinker, and one wonders if Allington is a proxy for Amis himself.

I ended the book feeling highly conflicted. It’s hard to read a first-person narrative without identifying with the character, and Maurice Allington is a hero in many ways. He’s cool, calm and collected under pressure. He loves his daughter and father. He keeps it together for others - his guests, his friends, his immediate family. His whole life is one of service. And he’s the only one standing between his daughter and an undead pedophile who is stalking her from the underworld.

But then there’s the other side. Kingsley Amis doesn’t allow us to romanticize Allington; in fact, he throws Allington’s vices in our faces repeatedly. Drunkenness, compulsiveness, using and lying, and typical addict behavior crop up again and again.

Amis provokes this conflict within the character every time you start to root for Maurice Allington as “the good guy.” The truth is, Allington is not a good guy, or at least if he is, he is also a “bad guy.” It’s almost as if Amis is telling us that the line between good and evil runs through every soul, and asking us whether we can take the bad with the good.

Three weeks after finishing The Green Man, I’m not sure if Maurice Allington is a good character or not, but I’m sure I’ll never forget him. And that’s what great literature is all about.