In 1972, the term “near-death experience” was unheard of. When a six-year-old Belgian girl nearly drowned in a lake and attempted to explain where she had gone and what she had seen, the adults dismissed it as childish nonsense.
 
That might have an end to the story, but then Maryse came close to death again: and again, many times over. She had been born with Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome which caused her heart to stop without warning. This occurred twice a week on average over a period of 25 years and each time, she would enter a magical, timeless world of living colours, where she soared and pulsated with their loving vibrations. And each time, her heart would kick back in at a terrifying speed and she would be back and breathing again.
 
It made her into an apprehensive, misunderstood child and a vulnerable adult until, at the age of 31, a surgeon finally diagnosed her condition and cured her heart. She was now physically well, but her secret world, the one that meant so much to her, was lost. A long, dark depression followed until she at last emerged through the medium of painting, had life-changing experiences with a dolphin and native people in Australia, and then discovered the practice of Vedic Art, which she now teaches in order to bring out the creative life force in others. She is also an accomplished artist in her own right.
 
Maryse has never made a fuss of her near-death experiences—a quick calculation tells you there were about 2,500 of them—partly out of modesty, mostly because she is focussed on the present and her work, but what she learned in these epiphanies and in dream visions underlies all her teaching and makes for a very interesting and readable autobiography.
 
The drama of Maryse Alen’s story is that much more effective for the simple, direct style in which it is written.
 
The Colours of Freedom is published as an ebook and illustrated with 21 reproductions of Maryse’s paintings, which she made at crucial life moments to accompany and help her make sense of them. Flemish/Dutch readers can also buy the physical book.

At my mountain cottage, I can go days without seeing another soul and then my relating is with the trees, the butterflies and the warm wind. I will say hello to a lizard and scoop insects from the pool. I never feel truly alone. I can walk to villages and visit a friendly bar and see people whenever I want.
 
What struck me when I read Annie Dillard’s book was how committed she was to her solitary experiential exploration in the Virginia mountains. It was back in the 1970s. She was only 28 and she devoted an entire year of her young life to venturing out on her own from a cabin in the foothills, to the creek and its river and beyond, in a very particular quest. I admired the courage of her perseverance in observing and witnessing the local wildlands, and the intelligence of her reflections. Her book of meditative philosophy in natural surroundings is said to be in the tradition of Thoreau. I never read his “Walden”, but it sounds like they belong next to each other on the shelf.
 
“What I call innocence is the spirit’s unself-conscious state at any moment of pure devotion to its object.”
 
Annie is clearly desirous of opening her eyes to the glory of creation in all its brutal manifestation and, perhaps, being vouchsafed a kind of revelation by virtue of the very intensity of her scrutiny. Or, failing that, by means of stalking and creeping up on a secret vision or rapture.
 
She has no social existence here and something of the self-denial of a nun. Annie Dillard herself insisted that she was no naturalist. The intent is more theosophical and self-aware. If she draws any conclusion, it seems to be that the cruelty of nature is not evil, but simply mindless. She wishes to vindicate the world she sees and its fascination.
 
There is a tendency to grandiloquence in her prose, and then instead of being lucid it can be too rich, the style too prodigious, but never excessively so. The tone is always gentle and the portrayal captivating.
 
“These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present.”

It’s all down to that first-person narration: Paula, in her head, in her hellhole of a marriage, in her Dublin vernacular.
 
Because she knows how to tell her story, straight out, it’s incredibly alive with undiluted truth and emotion and pain even as she jokes about it.
 
“Something had gone wrong.
I fell.
I’d been too near him; he hadn’t realised.
He’d only been warning me.
He didn’t know his own strength.
He had things on his mind.
Anything.
It wouldn’t happen again. Anything. It wouldn’t happen again. How could it? It had been a mistake. We’d laugh about it later.”
 
This is domestic physical and emotional abuse. This is exactly how it happens, what it looks like and how it feels. Paula is too emotionally invested, too scared, too bewildered to leave Charlo. There are no safeguards in these suburbs and so she takes it, again and again. 
 
This, too, is alcoholism: how it happens, what it looks like... When she goes to the shed and necks the wine, it is a killer of a description.
 
Brutally eloquent, pitch black with humour, brilliantly written. Hats off to Roddy Doyle. He doesn’t know it (or me), but I have a double connection with him, via Fighting Words and Fish Publishing.

Ballard is one of those authors who I would like to like more than I do. He has a penchant for placing characters and the reader in nightmarish and inextricable situations that fail to acquire depth or redemptive truth. I find fault with his style which can be stilted and repeat identical images and even vocabulary. The narratives are disturbing without being rewarding. There’s no reason why they should be, of course: Ballard, the writer, owes me nothing, but I am left wanting more.
 
Empire of the Sun is different and there is no doubt that it lies in the strong connection with Ballard’s childhood, when during the Second World War he was in an internment camp in Japanese-occupied Shanghai. In later novels, he will concoct scenarios in which his sense of displacement and alienation is acted out. Here, he is remembering. It is real and grounded, if fictionalized. The plot and its visual representation are engrossing.
 
The book is run through with a terrible honesty that holds it together and guarantees it power and poignancy. Boys are fascinated by war. In the midst of it all, he is excited by the Japanese soldiers and planes and “happy in the detention centre.” Jim is just at that age when he perceives uncomfortable facts without being appalled by the insight. The boy realizes that Dr Ransome “resented Jim for revealing an obvious truth about the war, that people were only too able to adapt to it.”
 
Even when Jim is separated from his parents, alone and in danger, attempting to survive and starving, Ballard resists a sentimental treatment that would undermine the integrity of the boy’s character and the book is more moving for it.

A worldwide blight of male infertility means that the human race is slowly but steadily dying out. Rather than a global catastrophe set to wipe us out in short shrift, what makes the premise so powerful and the book’s drama so different is the timing: how long there is left.
 
Crime novelist P.D. James speculated on how a society might behave under such a collective death sentence and The Children of Men was what she came up with.
 
Although it is set thirty years in the future, James describes pretty much the fabric of the real England of 1992 in which she wrote, which makes the story compellingly credible. The English answer to their existential predicament is to install an oppressive police state to maintain order, while managing their slow but inescapable demise. The country has degenerated into a sinister and dismal place. Squalor is the ubiquitous norm.
 
To preserve resources for the younger, citizens who reach sixty are supposedly encouraged, but in fact drugged and herded, to mass suicides: ceremonial drownings called Quietus. The last children ever to be born, called Omegas, who are indulged by law, act disappointingly selfishly. In Bexhill-on-Sea of all places (an inspired choice!), a so-called refugee camp is a detention centre where detainees are abused in every way by camp guards.
 
Meanwhile, for many people there is no immediate panic, of course, and everyday life goes strangely on. It is this absurd normality that gives the book its unique tone and underlying tension. Reflection is that much more poignant when you know that there is to be no future. I was gripped from the first page.
 
The ones who are alive now are the last. When the youngest extant generation dies out, that will be it. A few decades at most… but for each person, it means their entire lifetime, which is all we ever have! The thought experiment, then, confronts us with the realization of how much our individual lives are predicated on hopes for a future in which we will not exist.
 
James, the expert crime writer, knows how to build suspense and also explore motivation, so that when the reluctant Theo acts to aid political resistance to the dictatorial regime of his cousin, we know that it is from compassion. With Theo, James presents us with a redemptive desire for selfless acts. While no religious undertone is intended or perceptible, (spoiler alert) Theo accompanies the stricken and pregnant Julian like a modern-day Joseph and Mary with a miracle birth imminent.  
 
The film of the book is worthy of special mention. It is all gritty realism with striking imagery and respectfully faithful to the spirit of the book. P.D. James approved of it. Director Alfonso Cuaron called it “the anti-Blade Runner” as the depicted future is not futuristic but grimly and grimily familiar, making it only too believable. In different backgrounds you have Picasso’s Guernica, a Banksy, “Arbeit Macht Frei” by The Libertines, Pink Floyd’s inflatable Battersea pig referencing Orwell’s Animal Farm, and in Bexhill, now a desolate, dangerous war zone, a detained refugee in a hood is chillingly reminiscent of TV footage of Abu Graib prison in the Iraq War.
 
It could never happen in England, could it?

Ah, what a treasure trove!
 
The twenty historical seafaring novels by Patrick O’Brian gave me a reading pleasure like no other. Once you’re into this series, you find yourself moving like a clipper at a rate of knots and you cannot stop. The writing is just that good.
 
O’Brian slips you effortlessly into the Napoleonic period, introduces you to Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, and before long you might as well have been press-ganged because you won’t be leaving their adventures for many a thousand nautical miles. The admiration one comes to feel for these very different main characters, with their well-defined strengths and deficiencies, is only outdone by their love for each other. Aubrey, the Navy captain, is extravert, adventurous, proud, ambitious, conservative. Maturin, the ship’s doctor and a covert spy, is introvert, reserved, courageous in less advertised ways, liberal. Both are ultimately men of integrity who value learning, delight in conversation, and have an eye open to the main chance. O’Brian is pretty weak on female characterization, so he chose wisely with his very particular ocean-going milieu.
 
He has also picked a certain moment when it was possible for a Navy captain to enjoy a certain autonomy, allowing him to express himself in action, while a voyager might be trying out or finding out the new, whether as ship’s commander, physician, amateur naturalist, or wide-eyed traveller.
 
Starting with Master and Commander, I thought that I would never navigate the dense naval jargon that packs some of O’Brian’s pages. But once I realized that was never going to make heads nor tails of it and that it really didn’t matter, I simply let the language wash over me and found that it added to the atmosphere and authenticity of the narrative. O’Brian is masterful on the detail of life on board ship, because he has the knack of making it complement and help the action along. The dialogue, in exchanges that make the sea sparkle and the rigging sing, is thoroughly believably late 18th century. It has wit, erudition and feeling. The action and adventure are superb.

Give it another two or three years and my fading memory will have forgotten the plots and allow me to enjoy all these books all over again.

A Phil Dick book for children.
 
You got werjes, wubs, trobes, spiddles, nunks & printers.
 
You got an anti-pet man who wants to put an end to the family cat’s illegal activity: “his illegal walking backwards into the kitchen.”
 
You got body-snatcher-like usurpation of a body with the father-thing
 
And you got parental inanity:
 
“They have what is called a high inertial quality, or rather an introversion of their psychic attitude.”
“What does that mean?” Nick asked.
His dad replied, “It means nothing at all. It was just a random thought that came to my mind.”
 
PKD city!

The unreliable narrator is a potent device and in “Engleby,” Faulks puts it to work to make an adrenalized detective of the reader.
 
His shrewd first-person protagonist is as compellingly interesting as he is disturbing, because you just don’t know what he might do next.
 
It’s a book unlike anything that Faulks has written, a superb crime thriller.

What’s the smallest book you’ve ever read?
 
This edition of a Borges story is smaller than a teabag.
 
I found it in Buenos Aires, the best city on earth for books and bookshops of all shapes and sizes.
 
Following an accident, Funes is condemned to remember every detail of his life as a unique event that cannot be compared to any other, so that he is unable to generalize, see patterns, or make connections. He cannot, therefore, speak meaningfully of his experience.
 
Borges speculates on a language in which the perception of every animal and leaf and stone in its particular moment would have its own noun. Any such language would, of course, be an endless, indefinable accumulation.
 
The idea points interestingly to the insufficiency of language when faced with uncapturable reality. It is also quintessential Borges, who, in his obsessive pursuit of the idea of the perfection of knowledge, typically ends up creating abstract meta-libraries of the mind.
 
That’s quite a lot for a little book.
 
I’m just surprised that he didn’t take it one neurotic, philosophical step further and propose vocabulary for the experiences of the “gaps” between Funes’s focussed perceptions, seeing as there are no such gaps, only a continuous flow.
 
I don’t care for Borges myself. In fiction, I look for real-life characters, not ciphers for intellectual conjectures. Without depth or feeling, his craftsmanship remains another extremely clever yet lifeless language.
 
Ireneo Funes, by the way, is from Fray Bentos, which British readers may be curious to learn is not a corned beef factory but a city in Uruguay.
 
The green peppers are the first from the garden this summer and have gone into a chili con carne. The teabag is Yorkshire and made a very nice cuppa.

When the lead character is likeably flawed, I love a good private detective series.
 
The fictional world has to be convincingly real and the stories must have pace, and you can play around with the paradigm, but you can’t beat the purity of the classical format.
 
Kerr dreams up his own suitably hard-boiled, cynical, battle-scarred, tough guy and what kind of benign milieu does he give Bernie to operate in? 1930s Berlin, with the rise of Nazism as the background narrative, and semblances of ordinary decency in police work and society at large being eradicated.
 
It’s the lone crusader archetype that gets me. Independent, but not egotistical. Successful, but not always. Unorthodox, but not too much. With a conscience, but a stained one. Philip Kerr’s wife, Jane, wrote: “He loved to paint Bernie into an ethical corner ‘so he can’t cross the floor without getting paint on his shoes.’”
 
Each book in the series gives us a self-contained case and a darn good mystery to be solved. We accompany Bernie Gunther as he deals with corrupt, unsavoury individuals and historical political villains in his own inimitable way, speaking his mind with dark irony and pithy observations on the human condition in such a way that he just about manages to get away with it. Goebbels, for instance, might have shot another man, but the straight-talking, politically suspect Gunther he finds amusing, and provisionally spares him.
 
The Bernie story develops and extends beyond Germany and the original time frame, so that we also find him pursuing malfeasants in Argentina and the French Riviera.
 
Philip Kerr was very unwell and struggling by the end of the series, so that Metropolis just doesn’t have the dynamic verve of the rest, but don’t let that put you off. Bernie Gunther is your definitive anti-hero and you have a solid oeuvre of fourteen thrillers to enjoy him in.