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.