The Green Man (New York Review Books Classics) by Kingsley Amis

Author:Kingsley Amis [Amis, Kingsley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Horror, Paranormal
ISBN: 9781590176160
Amazon: 1590176162
Publisher: NYRB Classics
Published: 1970-01-01T11:00:00+00:00

4: The Young Man

‘Death’s an integral part of life, after all. We settle for it by the mere act of being born. Let’s face it, Mr Allington, it is possible to take the end of the road a bloody sight too seriously.’

‘And you don’t mean because we ought to think of it as the gateway to another mode of being and part of God’s purpose and so on.’

‘Good God, no. I don’t mean that at all. Not at all.’

The Reverend Tom Rodney Sonnenschein, Rector of St James’s, Fareham, sounded quite shocked. He did not really look shocked, because he had one of those smooth, middle-aged-boyish faces that seem unfitted, even at moments of warmth or concern (if any), to express much more than a mild petulance. In the church and at the graveside, I had supposed him to be showing indignation at the known godlessness of all those in attendance, or perhaps to be suffering physically; now, in the bar of the Green Man, it was becoming deducible that he had been merely bored. I found it odd, and oddly unwelcome too, to meet a clergyman who was turning out to be, doctrinally speaking, rather to the Left of a hardened unbeliever like myself; but no doubt he would soon be off to some more spiritually challenging parish in London, and anyhow I did not proposed to see the man again after today.

‘Not at all?’ I asked.

‘You know, this whole immortality bit’s been pretty well done to death. One’s got to take the historical angle. Immortality’s just a passing phase. Basically, it was thought up by the Victorians, especially the early Victorians, as a sort of guilt thing. They’d created the evils of the Industrial Revolution, they could sense what kind of ghastly bloody monster capitalism was going to turn out to be, and the only refuge from hell on earth they could think of was a new life away from the smoke and the stink and the cries of the starving kids. Whereas today, of course, now it’s beginning to get through people’s heads at last that capitalism just won’t do, that the whole bloody thing’s simply not on, and we can set about changing society so as to give everybody a meaningful and organic existence here on earth, well, we can put immortality back in the junk-room along with, oh, mutton-chop whiskers and Mr Gladstone and the Salvation Army and evolution.’

‘Evolution?’

‘Surely,’ stated the rector, simultaneously smiling hard and frowning hard and dilating his nostrils and blinking rapidly, one for each, perhaps, of his pieces of junk-room furniture.

‘Oh well … But what I don’t quite see is why these Victorians of yours were so keen on the idea of an after-life when they were so eaten up with guilt about what they’d been doing in this one. They’d have thought they’d be much more likely to end up in hell than in any sort of—’

‘Oh, but, my dear, that’s the whole point, do you see. They were mad about

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