A Matter of Life and Death – Blood and Porridge

October 31, 2024October 31, 2024

Malaysian macabre 2: The Muse and Other Stories by Chua Kok Yee

© Penguin Books

More Halloween-inspired stuff…

The Muse and Other Stories is the second collection of Malaysian horror tales I’ve read recently. The other was My Lovely Skull and Other Skeletons by Tunku Halim, which I reviewed on this blog a few posts ago.

The Muse… is the work of Chua Kok Yee. Like Tunku Halim, he seems to have led a Jekyll-and-Hyde existence – turning into a horror writer after sunset and penning stories of gruesome terror, but during the sunlit hours doing the sort of respectable, wholesome job that your parents would boast about you doing at dinner parties with friends. In Halim’s case, he combined horror writing with being a legal expert who practised corporate and conveyancing law. In Chua’s case (if I’ve located the correct person on social media), the non-horror world knows him as an accountant and ‘Adjunct Professor at University Putra Malaysia’, with ‘a history of working in the food and beverage and consumer goods industry’. Which shows you should never judge by appearances.

There are eight stories in The Muse… It starts strongly with the title tale, a cynical take on the idea that there are beautiful (inevitably female) muses whose only function is to channel inspiration towards great (inevitably male) artists. In reality, this has often been a case of women who were talented artists in their own right having their work ignored and being used, abused and eventually abandoned by those supposedly drawing inspiration from them. See, for example, Camille Claude, muse to Augustin Rodin, an artist herself, who ended up spending 30 years in an asylum; or Dora Maar, muse to Pablo Picasso, a photographer, who ended up needing psychiatric treatment and afterwards took solace in religion.

In Chua’s story, an up-and-coming novelist, and married man, called Mark Lee Wing Sen has an adulterous relationship with a younger woman called Leanne, which seemingly causes a new fervour and intensity in his writing: “…Leanne’s voice kept echoing in my head. The characters, plot and structure of the story flowed into my mind as if it was demanding to be told… I was almost like a new person after Leanne and I started our affair. Throughout the years, she inspired me more than anyone or anything else in the world… Her fingerprints are all over my books. She was my muse; a flowing river of inspiration that provided sustenance to this storytelling.” However, their relationship turns sour and worse, leading to causing obsession, murder and madness. And it doesn’t stop there. The ‘river of inspiration’ continues to flow into Mark from Leanne, but the writing she induces in him now is deadly in nature.

Rather brilliantly, the story’s two heroes – Mark’s agent Arun and a physician called Dr Leong whom he summons when he discovers Mark in shockingly poor health – cite the works of Stephen King when they realise they’re up against a supernatural foe and find themselves speculating on matters of good and evil. In particular, they discuss Father Callahan, the weak-willed priest in Salem’s Lot (1975), who’s unable to stand up to the chief vampire despite being armed with a cross. This is because his faith isn’t strong enough, which renders the cross useless: “At that moment, the cross lost its power and the vampire won.”

© New English Library

Elsewhere, two stories have scenarios where a pair of characters who knew each other as children meet up years later – and with their unexpected reunions come unsettling twists. In Remember, it’s a boy, Ah Hong, who’s suddenly contacted by his long-lost sister, Yee Ching. In Under the Mask, a young girl called Anna encounters a young man called Jiang whom she recalls was an orphan from a charitable institution sent to live in her household for a time. The institution had a programme whereby its orphans were temporarily given ‘a chance to be part of a natural home.’ Remember’s twist is slightly predictable, but the one in Under the Mask is shocking and upsetting.

Several stories showcase Chua’s sense of humour. Sword of Angel amusingly combines a gritty Malaysian crime drama with a fantasy story in the manner of the classic Michael Powell-Emeric Pressburger movie A Matter of Life and Death. Admittedly, this is a pretty warped variation on A Matter of Life and Death. An incompetent gangster gets himself killed whilst on his way to rub out an informer, but then is raised from the dead by a mysterious shapeshifting angel known simply as ‘Mike’. The angel wants him to carry out a different assassination – that of a seemingly innocuous kid called Calvin, who needs to be terminated because “the angel in charge of his Fortune Scale screwed up” and made him supernaturally and harmfully lucky: “He’s not merely ‘lucky’. He is an abomination! You know, luck is not infinite. It comes from a pool, and every time this Calvin drinks from it, someone else is deprived of their rightful share. And I’m telling you, he is guzzling it down. I have to put a stop to it.”

The gangster is less than happy to find himself back in the world of the living in a zombie-like state, bearing the scars of a recent autopsy: “…my body was festooned with stitches. They looked like huge, black centipedes on my arms and thighs. The worst was the huge Y-shaped incision that ran down my torso.” Later, he’s also displeased to learn that he’s not the only dead gangster Mike has reanimated in order to take out Calvin. The story is enjoyable largely because of its hapless and grumbling protagonist and it’s gratifying when he finally figures out a way to turn the tables on the devious Mike.

Similarly, Duke of Zhi has supernatural forces making an intervention in the world of the living and compelling an unfortunate mortal to do their bidding. The reason this time is more mundane. The denizens of hell, led by the narrator’s deceased mother, are concerned about the Loh family, who ‘run the Chinese funeral paraphernalia shop called Loh Paper Enterprise’ and are ‘the best funeral paraphernalia shop in Kuala Lumpur.’ The highlights of their ‘funeral paraphernalia’ are their lavishly detailed paper mansions that, according to Chinese custom, are burnt at funerals in the belief they’ll be passed on to the deceased in the afterlife, where those dead souls can live inside them in comfort.

The narrator gets a glimpse of the paper mansion he purchased from the Lohs for his mother, which now accommodates her in hell: “I was inside a huge hall, filled with exquisite-looking furniture. The chairs were carved from wood, painted in gold and decorated with intricate carvings… A crystal chandelier hung majestically high above, while every inch of the walls was adorned with abstract motifs of animals. Yes, it was the most elegant room I had ever been in…. ‘Hey! I know this place!’ I exclaimed, and jumped to my feet.”

It transpires that the young man set to inherit the Loh family’s business, despite having ‘talent that could rival his grandfather,’ isn’t interested in taking it on. “He doesn’t know his importance to us here in the afterlife, because he’s a non-believer… Despite his gift, he prefers to run a hipster coffee shop instead… Millions of souls would be forced to stay in substandard mansions…” The bewildered narrator is tasked with convincing Loh Junior to abandon the coffee shop, keep the family business going, and keep providing the spirits of the dead with opulent housing. It’s a task that, predictably, he bungles.

Duke of Zhi is amusing with its depiction, in these Trumpian times, of an afterlife whose inhabitants of are just as obsessed with real estate as living souls are. It also touches on a rather sad fact in the real world, which is the art of the “traditional Chinese paper house crafters… is quickly dying as an increasing number of people seek alternative ways to honour their deceased relatives.”

I also like the story because it features the demon Horse-Face, one of the guardians of hell in Chinese mythology. You can see a human-sized effigy of him at Har Par Villa, the most fascinating museum in Singapore. There, he stands at the entrance of the Villa’s most famous (or infamous) attraction, a graphic representation of the Ten Courts of Hell. I wanted to write something about Har Par Villa on this blog during the run-up to Halloween 2024, but couldn’t find the time. I will soon, though.

Also touching on local folklore are the stories Akuan, which draws on legends of the harimau akuan, that is, ‘were-tiger, were-leopard or were-panther’, and Feed the Boy, which features a toyol. A toyol, the latter story’s protagonist hears from a mysterious antiques dealer, is “the soul of an unborn baby possessed by a djinn. By nature, a djinn is wild and fiery. It’s the baby’s soul that tempers its more dangerous side, turning it tame and obedient. The soul will be weakened if it’s not fed by the blood of its master. When that happens, the wild nature of the djinn would take over.” But fed by blood, and kept ‘tame and obedient’, a toyal scuttles off to commit crimes on its master’s behalf. It uses its diminutive size to enter other people’s homes, rob them and bring back their valuables.

This suits the protagonist of Feed the Boy, Edry, a hard-up food-delivery man “feeling envious of old school friends who were driving new Japanese cars, while he could only afford a motorcycle. He felt like a loser whenever he delivered food to beautiful houses and condominiums, because their bathrooms alone were more spacious than his rented room.” Edry’s fortunes take an upswing when he acquires a toyol – which disconcertingly has a name, Aamir. He grows rich thanks to Aamir’s ‘nightly heists’ and feeding it with his blood, which it extracts from his toes, seems a small price to pay.

He becomes less keen on the creature when, a few years later, he gets married and his wife becomes pregnant. It’s then that he learns how “sometimes a toyol can become excited by the presence of another child in the household.” What follows, chronicling Edry’s attempts – inevitably doomed attempts, because this is a horror story – to get rid of Aamer, makes this for me the best tale in the book.

With its mixture of the up-to-date and the traditional, and the gruesome and the funny, and with its references to both Malaysian and Western culture, I found The Muse and Other Stories a solidly entertaining read. So, I recommend you to purchase a copy of it and enjoy the products of Chua Kok Yee’s fertile imagination.

Alternatively, of course, you could send your tame toyol crawling into your nearest bookshop, library or Amazon book-warehouse after business hours and procure a copy that way…

From linkedin.com

February 28, 2024March 1, 2024

The magnificent Seven Moons

© Sort Of Books

I’ve just realised that over the past year or so I’ve coincidentally read five novels that were winners of Britain’s most prestigious literary award, the Booker Prize. The first four I read are as follows, ranked in descending order of greatness:

Very good: Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart, which won the Booker in 2020. Inevitably, being about alcoholism, betrayal and homophobia in economically-ravaged, 1980s Glasgow, it’s a tough read. One thing I found oddly depressing about it is how it reminded me of a time, not so long ago, when everyone from 15 years upwards seemed to have dentures.

Good: The Testaments by Margaret Atwood, joint-winner in 2019. Atwood is always decent value, but this follow-up to 1985’s The Handmaid’s Tale doesn’t quite have the same punch. Partly this is because, as a sequel, it’s less ideas-driven than the original. Partly it’s because The Testaments dares to have a happy ending. But it’s certainly interesting to see Aunt Lydia get a redemptive arc.

Okay: The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton, winner in 2013. Parts of this 19^th-century, New Zealand-set murder mystery were engrossing, but with 832 pages and what felt like a cast of thousands – well, dozens – my interest was inevitably going to flag in places. Still, kudos to Catton for constructing a novel that’s positively Dickensian in its size and ambition.

Tedious bollocks: The Old Devils by Kingsley Amis, winner in 1986. Geriatric, right-wing Welsh windbags make fools of themselves in a gentrified version of 1980s Wales that I suspect only ever existed in Kingsley Amis’s imagination.

But for me the best of the lot was The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Sri Lankan writer Shehan Karunatilaka, which netted the Booker in 2022 and which I finished reading the other day. No doubt I’m biased and have an advantage when it comes to this novel. It’s set in Colombo and I lived in that city for eight years myself, which makes me familiar with much of the book’s geography, cultural references and historical context, to say nothing of the cynical and self-deprecating Sri Lankan humour that pervades its pages. That sense of humour, by the way, is one of the things I now miss most about the place.

But even if you’re not acquainted with Sri Lanka when you open the book, I suspect you’ll be impressed by Seven Moons – at least, if you give it a chance to draw you in. Karunatilaka’s work veers from the exuberantly fantastical to the grimly realistic, from the hilarious to the horrific, from the vauntingly highbrow to the cheerfully lowbrow, from the sublime to the ridiculous, sometimes within the space of one page.

The novel takes place in the late 1980s and begins with titular character Maali Almeida experiencing the end of his physical existence, as a human, and the start of his ephemeral existence, as a ghost. He finds himself in a weird, netherworld version of Colombo, where he can see, but not interact with, the living, but where ghosts and other supernatural beings mill about too – the more adept of them have mastered the neat trick of travelling around on the winds. The spectral bureaucracy that processes the newly deceased urges him to continue onto the proper afterlife, which is only open to him for the next seven nights, or seven moons, of his passing.

But Maali is more concerned with hanging around and finding out the details of his death. Suffering from a sort of Post-Death Stress Disorder, he can’t remember how it happened. As he was a war photographer when he was alive – 1980s Sri Lanka being in the throes of civil war – it’s likely he was murdered. And the reason for his murder was likely some sensitive photographs he took that could have serious consequences for one of the country’s top politicians.

Half-murder-mystery, half-phantasmagorical-adventure, the story rattles along with Maali trying to overcome his limitations as a ghost and find a way of communicating with the two people he was closest to when he was alive, his ‘official’ girlfriend Jaki and his ‘unofficial’ boyfriend DD – Maali was a gay man in a time and place where it was probably safer to stay closeted – with the ultimate aim of solving the mystery of his death and securing the important photographs.

Along the way, he encounters all manner of eccentrics, misfits and miscreants. In the living world, there are crooked politicians, crooked policemen, dodgy NGO workers, dodgy journalists, arms dealers, torturers, ‘garbage collectors’ (the goons who dispose of the bodies of those eliminated during the government’s dirty war against real and imagined dissent) and an unhelpful clairvoyant called the Crow Man. In the ethereal world, there are ghosts, ghouls and yakas (demons from Sri Lankan mythology), including one embittered spirit, a murdered Marxist called Sena, who’s assembling an army of the dead whilst trying to figure out a way, intangible though he is, of violently striking back at his still-living tormentors and executioners.

From wikipedia.org / © Deshan Tennekoon

Seven Moons‘s allegory about the victim of a senseless war trying to make sense of it on the other side, as a ghost, could come across as heavy-handed. But Karunatilaka invests the fantastical elements of his narrative with the exactly the right amounts of absurdity and bemusement. It’s no surprise that he lists Douglas Adams and Kurt Vonnegut in the book’s acknowledgements. Again, the humour has a distinctly local flavour. For example, the celestial sorting office where Maali, deceased, finds himself at the beginning is conceptually like something from Michael Powell and Emric Pressburger’s classic movie A Matter of Life and Death (1945), but its chaotic nature feels pretty Sri Lankan. Anyone who’s ever tried to get their EPF (Employees’ Provident Fund) from the Department of Labour off Kirula Road will understand.

Meanwhile, a famous quote by legendary science-fiction author and long-term Sri Lankan resident Arthur C. Clarke could be the blueprint for Karunatilaka’s vision of Colombo, overrun with the souls of the dead: “Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living.” In the midst of the spectral mayhem, Maali refers to Clarke’s quote and adds, “You look around you and fear the great man’s estimate might have been conservative.”

At the same time, the fantasy in no way diminishes the book’s accounts of the horrors perpetrated during the Sri Lankan Civil War. This was when the government wasn’t locked in a struggle just with the LTTE, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, who wanted a separate Tamil state but were “prepared to slaughter Tamil civilians and moderates to achieve this”, but also with the JVP, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, who wanted “to overthrow the capitalist state” but were “willing to murder the working class while they liberate them.” These organisations and others – including the STF, the Special Task Force, the government’s abduction, torture and execution squad – are listed and described in a passage near the beginning, for the benefit of readers unfamiliar with the country back then. It comes with the advice: “Don’t try and look for the good guys ‘cause there ain’t none.”

In one interview, Karunatilaka observed that bleak though things have been in Sri Lanka during its recent economic crisis, brought about by the corrupt and idiotic mismanagement of the Rajapaksa regime, the situation doesn’t come close to how it was in the war-torn 1980s. “I’ve no doubt many novels will be penned against Sri Lanka’s protests, petrol queues and fleeing Presidents. But even though there have been scattered incidents of violence, today’s economic hardship cannot be compared to the terror of 1989 or the horror of the 1983 anti-Tamil pogroms. We all pray it stays that way.”

One other thing I enjoyed about Seven Moons is how it captures the odd, hybrid culture that young people in 1980s Colombo must have inhabited – at least, the more affluent, English-speaking ones, of whom Maali is an example. Mixed in with the Sri Lankan cultural references are the expected ones from America – Elvis Presley is prominent and Maali seems to have a hankering for Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982). Of course, looming over the whole novel is the shadow of that most 1980s-feeling of Hollywood movies, the Demi Moore / Patrick Swayze schmaltz-a-thon Ghost. (Though I’ve just checked and discovered it wasn’t a 1980s movie. It came out in 1990.)

British culture – due no doubt to the colonial connection – gets a look-in too, with mentions of Yorkshire Television’s durable lunchtime legal-drama show Crown Court (1972-84), the BBC’s rickety but impressively downbeat space opera Blake’s Seven (1977-81) and cheesy but popular Welsh retro-rocker Shakin’ Stevens.

But most amusing is Maali’s love of bombastic British rock-pop band Queen and their flamboyant singer, the late Freddie Mercury. I found it hilarious that – watch out, spoilers approaching! – one of the plot’s main MacGuffins turns out to have been concealed inside the sleeve of Queen’s universally derided 1982 album Hot Space. It’s the perfect hiding place. Because no one in their right mind would ever dream of opening the sleeve of Hot Space.

© EMI / Elektra

October 20, 2021October 20, 2021

Kingsley goes green

© Penguin Books

And here’s another re-posting in anticipation of Halloween, one that originally appeared on this blog seven years ago. This time, I offer my thoughts on Kingsley Amis’s ghostly novel of 1969, The Green Man.

I can claim to be neither an expert on nor a fan of Kingsley Amis. While I’ve enthusiastically worked my way through the fiction of several of his contemporaries – Anthony Burgess, William Golding, Graham Greene – until recently I’d read only a couple of Amis’s short stories and one of his books, Lucky Jim. The latter was an early (1954) example of the literary sub-genre now known as the ‘campus novel’ and I have to say I found it pretty dated and unfunny.

I suspect the main reason for my aversion to Kingsley Amis, though, is the persona he projected when he was alive. He didn’t seem like a nice piece of work and so I rarely felt an urge to dip into his writing. In the 1950s he trumpeted his support for the Labour Party but by the 1980s he’d become an enthusiastic fan of Mrs Thatcher. He seemed to me pretty typical of people whose politics undergo a severe rightward turn during their lifetimes. Socialist egalitarianism and liberal permissiveness are great things when you have youth, and a lack of material possessions, on your side. But when you reach a point in your life when you’re too old, and too moneyed, to benefit from them any longer, and when a younger, upstart generation arrives on the scene with their own ideas about how to do things, it’s time to change into a reactionary old fart and whinge about other people being radical in a way you once were yourself.

But far worse than Amis’s Conservatism was the fact that in later years he seemed unashamedly anti-Semitic, racist and misogynistic. I’ve read an interview with his long-suffering second wife Elizabeth Jane Howard in which she, rather gallantly, blamed much of that nastiness not on Amis but on his fondness for alcohol. In other words, his odiousness was really just the drink speaking. However, I can’t help thinking of an old saying they have in Northern Ireland: “If it’s not in you when you’re sober, it won’t come out of you when you’re drunk.”

Still, I have one reason for liking Amis, and that’s because unlike nearly everyone else in Britain’s snobbish literary establishment at the time, he didn’t look down his nose at genre writing. He was openly supportive of it and occasionally dabbled in it himself. For example, Amis was one of Ian Fleming’s most heavyweight admirers and it’s fitting that, after Fleming’s passing, he was the first person to write a non-Fleming James Bond novel, Colonel Sun, which he published in 1968 under the pseudonym Robert Markham.

Amis was also a big fan of science fiction and in 1960 he wrote a critique of the genre, New Maps of Hell. As J.G. Ballard noted, New Maps of Hell was important for science fiction’s development because Amis “threw open the gates of the ghetto, and ushered in a new audience which he almost singlehandedly recruited from those intelligent readers of general fiction who until then had considered science fiction on par with horror comics and pulp westerns.” Predictably, though, the curmudgeonly Amis went off science fiction in the 1960s when younger sci-fi writers like Ballard, Brian Aldiss, Michael Moorcock, Roger Zelazny, Harlan Ellison and Thomas M. Disch started going all experimental and New Wave-y on him. Before long, he was raging at how those whippersnappers had contaminated his beloved science fiction with horrible things like “pop music, hippie clothes and hairdos, pornography, reefers” and “tricks with typography, one-line chapters, strained metaphors, obscurities, obscenities, drugs, Oriental religions and left-wing politics.”

Amis seemed too to be interested in supernatural stories and in 1969 he tried his hand at writing one, a novel called The Green Man. This has long been a neglected entry in Amis’s oeuvre, overshadowed by more prestigious books like Jake’s Thing (1978) and The Old Devils (1986), out of print and near impossible to find in bookshops. It was, however, adapted into a three-part drama serial by the BBC in 1990, with the script written by none other than Malcolm Bradbury, an author whose own books like Eating People is Wrong (1959) and The History Man (1975) were examples of the campus novel that Amis had helped pioneer with Lucky Jim. The TV version of The Green Man starred the splendid Albert Finney and it began with a memorable and grisly sequence that didn’t evoke Kingsley Amis, or Malcolm Bradbury, so much as it evoked Sam Raimi’s 1981 classic schlock-horror movie The Evil Dead.

Anyway, I enjoyed the televisual The Green Man so much that I made a mental note to set aside my prejudices against Amis and hunt down the original novel of The Green Man. It wasn’t until nearly a quarter-century later, however, that I noticed a new edition of The Green Man sitting on a shelf in a bookshop, bought it and finally got around to reading it. So here are my thoughts about this particular foray by Kingsley Amis into the realms of the paranormal and macabre.

The Green Man is narrated by the fifty-something Maurice Allington, the character played by Albert Finney in its TV adaptation. He owns and runs an inn of some antiquity, the titular Green Man, on the way from London to Cambridge. Living on the premises with his second wife Joyce (his junior by a number of years), his teenage daughter Amy and his ailing father, Allington is unnerved when the hoary old ghost stories associated with the inn over the centuries start to intrude on reality. In particular, he has several encounters with the ghost of Thomas Underhill, a supposed sorcerer who lived in the building in the 17^th century; and he senses the presence of a more monstrous apparition, a demonic creature that Underhill once summoned up from the local woods to destroy his antagonists. The inn’s name is a clue to this demon’s constitution.

Allington eventually realises he’s become enmeshed in a scheme that Underhill has devised to transcend his own death. However, his attempts to outwit the ghostly sorcerer are hampered by his own failings: his ill-health, his liking for the bottle – to which, of course, his family and friends attribute his strange visions – and the distractions posed by his carnal appetites. Not only is the lusty Allington engaged in an affair with another younger woman, Diana, who’s the wife of the local doctor, but he’s devised a less-than-noble scheme of his own. He wants to persuade both Joyce and Diana to participate with him in a ménage à trois.

I hadn’t got far into The Green Man before I’d realised that both the book’s greatest strength and its greatest weakness are its characterisations. Amis does an excellent job of sketching Allington, with his many vices and virtues. He’s annoyingly conceited, intellectually as well as socially. Talking about his book collection, he says sniffily: “I have no novelists, finding theirs a puny and piffling art, one that, even at its best, can render truthfully no more than a few minor parts of the total world it pretends to take as its field of reference. A man has only to feel some emotion, any emotion, anything differentiated at all, and spend a minute speculating how this would be rendered in a novel… to grasp the pitiful inadequacy of all prose fiction to the task it sets itself.” Allington, thus, is a poetry snob. “By comparison… verse – lyric verse, at least – is equidistant from fiction and life, and is autonomous.”

Actually, his love for the poetic and his disdain for the more mechanical medium of prose remind me slightly of the late 19^th century / early 20^th century occult writer Arthur Machen, who speculated in his fiction that supernatural phenomena are best perceived by people with receptive intellects and imaginations. These include the very young, the insane and the poetically-inclined. Perhaps that’s why, of all the people living, dining and drinking in the Green Man, the verse-loving Allington is the one with whom the supernatural intelligence of Thomas Underhill makes contact.

Meanwhile, feminist readers will no doubt feel like strangling Allington on account of his baser musings. “Ejaculation,” he comments at one point, “as all good mistresses know, is a great agent of change of mind and mood.”

And yet as a bundle of contradictory traits – stuck-up, sexist, cynical, drunken, cranky, comical, cunning, occasionally courageous and very occasionally principled – Allington is a believable figure in this story. He might be an unfortunate mess of vanity, lust and booze, but at the book’s finale, when he rushes out of the inn and into the night to try to save the sleepwalking Amy from the predatory green man, we aren’t surprised that he shows a streak of heroism as well.

But on the other hand, Amis is hopeless at drawing believable female characters here. Joyce and Diana give little impression of having minds of their own. They seem like manifestations of Amis’s notion of what women should be like – statuesque, well-bred and utterly pliable to the needs of the local Alpha Male. “Together,” says Allington, “they made an impressive, rather erectile sight, both of them tall, blonde and full-breasted… Dull would he be of soul that would pass up the chance of taking the pair of them to bed.” In their speech, meanwhile, they spout irritating upper-class adverb-adjective couplings: “jolly closed up”, “perfectly awful”, “frightfully exciting”, “damn good”. Late on in the book, Allington’s devious ménage à trois plan backfires and Joyce and Diana get their revenge on him, but this isn’t enough to convince me that they’re anything more than Kingsley Amis’s idea of desirable posh totty.

From artinfiction.wordpress.com

Elsewhere in the book, predictably, we’re treated to a list of things in the modern (or at least, 1960s-ish) world that the grumpy, ageing Amis finds appalling. He sounds off against radical students: “First one whiskered youth in an open frugiferous shirt, then another with long hair like oakum, scanned me closely as they passed, each slowing almost to a stop the better to check me for bodily signs of fascism, oppression by free speech, passive racial violence and the like.” He rails against popular music: “Amy’s gramophone was playing some farrago of crashes, bumps and yells from her room down the passage… I listened, or endured hearing it…” He has a go at trendy vicars: “I found it odd, and oddly unwelcoming too, to meet a clergyman who was turning out to be, doctrinally speaking, rather to the left of a hardened unbeliever like myself.” Readers will either find this aggravating or endearing. Now that Amis has been dead for a quarter-century and I’m in the process of turning into a grumpy old man myself, I have to confess I found it rather endearing – more so than I would have if I’d read the novel in my youth.

Failures in female characterisation aside, I generally enjoyed The Green Man and I had more fun reading it than I had with Lucky Jim. However, is the novel successful as a ghost story? In my opinion, for a ghost story to succeed, it needs to convey a degree of believability. If I can be lulled into thinking, however fleetingly, that this could be happening, I’m more likely to be affected, unsettled, even frightened by it. On this account, Amis’s book almost succeeds. For the most part, he convincingly moves the plot from being about a man whose home has some strange old tales attached to it to being about a man who has to deal with the unwelcome, ghostly protagonists of those tales. To facilitate this jump from the credible to the incredible, Amis adds some persuasive background details. A section where Allington visits a library at Cambridge University in search of a long-lost journal by Underhill has a scholarly believability that’s worthy of M.R. James.

Alas, all is betrayed by a scene near the novel’s climax where Amis goes too far and introduces another supernatural character, the most famous and powerful supernatural character of the lot – guess who that is. Now any story involving ghosts has implications about the wider scheme of things. It makes life after death a fact, which raises questions about the design and purpose of the universe and about the intelligence that might be behind it. However, for the sake of believability, it’s advisable for ghost-story writers to keep things localised and small-scale. In M.R. James’s celebrated short story Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, my Lad, for example, what’s important is that the hero is being pursued along a beach by a terrifying supernatural entity. Not that this entity’s existence calls into question our scientific assumptions about the universe – because if it does exist, then scientists are likely wrong and the priests, magicians and shamans of history were likely right.

Amis, unfortunately, can’t resist exploring the universe he’s created in The Green Man further than is necessary and so Allington ends up having an unexpected visit from the Big Man Upstairs. Their confrontation resembles something from the classic 1946 Michael Powell / Emeric Pressburger fantasy movie, A Matter of Life and Death. And that’s what The Green Man promptly becomes, a fantasy rather than a ghost story – a story that’s no longer believable and hence no longer scary.

J.G. Ballard once said of Kingsley Amis: “as with so many English novelists he was vaguely suspicious of the power of the imagination: it could be too much of a good thing. Yet the radical imagination is what we seek in a writer; when we read we want to encounter a very different world that will make sense of our own.”

Ironically, the problem with The Green Man is that in the end, and atypically, Amis lets his own imagination run away with him. The book would have been more effective if, like those English novelists whom Ballard complains about, he had decided that too much imagination here is a bad thing.