NORMAN LEWIS remembers having tea in Burma with an old man who had willed his body to the vultures. His host, who used to be a wood carver, had put up elaborate perches in his garden for the legatees "so that they could conveniently keep an eye on him while waiting for their inheritance to come through".
That encounter, 45 years ago, merits one short paragraph in this jam packed book, the second and, sadly, final instalment of his memoirs. In the following paragraph Lewis's Burmese guide points out the spot where Chinese soldiers tried to hang him from a tree. They were so weak from starvation and sickness that although they could haul him from the ground they could not keep him in the air; he ripped the rope from their hands and escaped.
From a trip to Peru with the photographer Tony Snowdon he recalls the alarming nonchalance of a local driver on a vertiginous climb along an Inca road in the Andes, on which his brother, also a driver, had been killed the previous year. Challenged over his failure to sound his horn at bends, the fellow "implied that to do so called into question the arrangements of Providence".
With Lewis, you will gather, it pays not to blink; otherwise you may mix up even continents in his kaleidoscope of marvels. He is 87 now, the doyen of travel writers, and he remains as sprightly and entertaining a companion as you could find for a circuit of the planet.
The world is a wonderland in which he has been footloose and agog with curiosity for well over half a century, stopping off here and there to turn out 13 novels, 11 non fiction books and, in the late Sixties, a report on the extermination of Indians in Brazil that led to the formation of Survival International, an agency for the protection of tribal peoples everywhere.
In this nostalgic retrospective, bizarre incident jostles outlandish anecdote for space on the page. Life for him is a theatre of the absurd, and the old magician manages to catch it on the wing in prose that is lyrical, luminous and extremely funny.
On one page he is enduring a lunch of carbonised Irish stew at the patrician Georgian offices of his publisher Jonathan Cape; on another he is feigning a religious fast to dodge a dish of mashed up lizards in a Burmese jungle. At a festival in Thailand he wins a lampshade at a coconut shy at which the missiles are hand grenades. In Havana, 94 year old General Garcia Velez, a former ambassador to Britain, shows him a prized heirloom that even Lewis considers weird - an album containing 51 pubic locks, including one from Catherine the Great of Russia, that a diligent ancestor had compiled to remind him of his conquests.
The album represented light hearted compensation for a bewildering meeting with Ernest Hemingway, a life long hero, who turned out to be neither literary lion nor action man but a querulous paranoiac, slow moving, cumbersome and burdened with flesh," sloshing about his bedroom with tumblers of Dubonnet. "A shattering experience of the kind likely to sabotage ambition," Lewis noted.
His publishers call this an autobiography but the author is strangely absent from the book. We learn that in 1959 he was driven from an eyrie above Oxford Street in London by the noise of Selfridges extending their store, and that he has since lived with his second wife in a remote corner of Essex. Groomed gardens not being to Lewis's liking, his parsonage has its own small wilderness of thorn bushes and nettles - "a sensitive plant which responds to encouragement" - and the place resounds with birdsong in a countryside that had become largely mute.
It is tempting, but would be quite unfair, to praise Norman Lewis as an entertaining English eccentric. He is not only eminently sane but profoundly wise. An ideal review of his book would simply list the myriad wonders of its world.