That Uncertain Feeling (1955) features a young provincial librarian (perhaps with an eye to Larkin working as a librarian in Hull) and his temptation to adultery. I Like It Here (1958) takes a contemptuous view of "abroad", after Amis's own travels on the Continent with a young family. Take a Girl Like You (1960) steps away from the immediately autobiographical, but remains grounded in the concerns of sex and love in ordinary modern life, tracing a young schoolmaster's courtship and ultimate seduction of the heroine. In the meantime Maurice has discovered his own notes of a drunken, and forgotten, midnight conversation with Underhill, during which Underhill begins to enlist Maurice's help in his as yet undisclosed scheme. This involves Maurice's unearthing of Underhill's nearby grave, in which he finds an ancient silver figurine that Underhill requests be brought to another midnight meeting in the inn's dining room. While other characters cannot believe in the ghost, the intensity of Maurice’s belief invites the reader to suspend that disbelief. Amis eases his readers into an acceptance of the supernatural by means of a variety of elements: the common sense and worldly character of the narrator, the characterization of the guests, the skillful use of incidental details to create the air of reality. People eat, drink, argue, reconcile, read, share, and make love with little or no expectation that anything out of the ordinary will (or can) happen. Maurice Allington is a fifty something, twice married, inn keeper/hotelier. For Maurice, life is a high speed, roller-coaster ride of juggling his various commitments - in this case 'commitment' equates to womanizing, drinking heavily, running his period inn The Green Man, and embellishing his establishment with tales of the resident ghost. On top of this he needs to find time to appease the boredom of his teenage daughter... oh, yes, and did I mention more whisky and women. Perhaps. Sometimes events in the past and present align to make events and stories overlap. This means that sometimes people in the present witness echoes from the past, kind of like ghosts. Sometimes the echo can go both ways and people from the past receive ripples of activity from the future.

Michael Barber (Winter 1975). "Kingsley Amis, The Art of Fiction No. 59". The Paris Review. Winter 1975 (64). It's the story of Maurice Allington, a known 'womanizer,' yet married with daughter, son, wife (second wife) and owner of an inn and restaurant in rural England. Maurice leads a fairly ordinary life, yet is interested in sex and having a threesome with his wife and the wife of a friend. His usual day sees him buying food for his restaurant, dealing with his employees and customers, and dallying about with said wife's friend. Maurice sees himself as sort of a carefree Hugh Hefner type. He's happy; he's not happy. He drinks too much; he has a lot of aches and pains, and then he sees a ghost... The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". The Times. ISSN 0140-0460 . Retrieved 26 September 2020.if I had not recently passed from being a notorious drunk to being a notorious drunk who had begun to see things…”

Then, one day, Maurice sees a strange woman at the top of the stairs which go to the private part of the Inn where he lives with his father, daughter and his second wife. She is dressed in the manner of women from a previous century. He looks away for a second, and she is gone. Maurice Allington is not the kind of guy you want to get mixed up with—he may be the well-known proprietor of the inn The Green Man, but he drinks far too much, ignores his wife and daughter, and spends his free time propositioning his friend’s wife. When he starts seeing things around the inn, we have to wonder if his drinking has finally addled his wits, for Maurice certainly doesn’t believe in the ghosts that he advertises to lure guests. Kingsley Amis is an important writer, and we cannot afford to lose him. It is no small thing to have written a good ghost story; to have written a ghost story that is also a major novel is nothing short of miraculous.”

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As the tension grows, so does Maurice; he passes through various stages of awakening to the truth of himself and another world. Underhill, as a doppelgänger, is evidence that evil is a real and active presence in the world and not just a concoction of the mind. His ghost is also a means by which Amis can credibly account for the forces that seek Maurice’s destruction—all that afflicts, mystifies, and weighs on him. Otherwise, it's an enjoyable story, but at the same time, it's far from superficial. Obviously, ghosts and death go hand in hand, but here death is treated largely from the existentialist point of view, as is, of course, life. So it makes one think about one's obsessions, fears, and actions, - but not in a way that would be incompatible with a drink :) Yet according to James, Amis reached a turning point when his drinking ceased to be social and became a way of dulling his remorse and regret at his behaviour towards Hilly. "Amis had turned against himself deliberately.... It seems fair to guess that the troubled grandee came to disapprove of his own conduct." [35] His friend Christopher Hitchens said: "The booze got to him in the end, and robbed him of his wit and charm as well as of his health." [37] Antisemitism [ edit ] The end of the sixties of the last century… What may that mean? It means the sexual revolution, an increased interest in occult subjects and mysticism and desire to change the state of mind with all sorts of psychotropic stuffs. Sir Kingsley Amis Dies; British Novelist and Poet", The Washington Post, 23 October 1995; Leader, 2006, p. 1.