I picked up a copy of Henry Treece's The Green Man years ago at a used book sale, intrigued by the Celtic imagery and the description of "sword, sorcery and savagery in King Arthur's time." I set it aside when I realized it wasn't actually a novel about King Arthur, although the war duke on which the mythical king was based does play a key role in the plot. Recently, I dug it out and decided to read it at last.

The protagonist of the book is Amleth, the legendary antecedent of Shakespeare's Hamlet. Appropriately enough, the story begins and ends in 6th-century Jutland (Denmark), where Amleth's father/king has been murdered by his uncle Feng, who then took Amleth's mother Gerutha as his queen. That's pretty much where the similarity to Shakespeare's play ends, although there are a few other familiar plot points: Amleth feigns madness after learning of his father's murder, the king's adviser Unferth is slain by Amleth while eavesdropping in the queen's chamber, and there are two men, Godgest and Hake, whose fates parallel that of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Like Ophelia, the lovelorn maiden Sibbi is driven insane by the book's end, although in Sibbi's case she is both Amleth's sort-of wife and his half-sister, and the conclusion of her story is far, far worse than Ophelia's.

Besides Amleth, the novel encompasses two other figures of legend: the aforementioned Arthur, who is an aging warlord suffering the effects of countless battles and is still holding off Cedric's Saxon hordes with the fickle support of the British kings, and Beowulf, an aging Geatish king striving to hold onto his youthful fame while amassing great wealth through piracy. There is even a connection to the long-ago Trojan War.

In his travels, Amleth brawls and drinks, loses friends and obtains two more sort-of wives: Elene, a flirtatious Briton in the lingering Roman tradition, and Elekt, a Pictish priestess who hopes to use Amleth to drive Arthur's people from the land.

But for all his ambitions, you kind of know that Amleth -- being the inspiration for Hamlet -- isn't going to come to a good end.

The book isn't a fantasy, despite the use of "sorcery" in the description, and the titular "green man" is not an overriding facet of the story. No one in the book is particularly likable -- not even Amleth -- and there is a lot of violence, sympathetic fertility magic, competing religions, rape and incest woven into the tale. It's a savage, cynical perspective that borrows heavily from the 12th-century writings of Saxo Grammaticus, from whose chronicles Shakespeare drew his Hamlet.

Treece, who died in 1966 before The Green Man was published, was a noted poet, children's and historical novelist, editor and teacher in the early to mid-20th century. His prose is certainly dated in its style, although it's also appropriate to his subject matter. While I can't say I truly enjoyed the book, I definitely am glad I read it. Like a bloody car wreck, it is hard to look away.