By Julian Evans Jonathan Cape £25
Reviewed by George Rosie

NORMAN Lewis is. And the title - Semi Invisible Man - is a perfect description of Lewis's current reputation. He's one of those neglected British authors whose books and essays are written with a power and clarity that is a lesson to anyone who puts pen to paper. It's a pity that Julian Evans failed to learn that lesson. His biography of Lewis is over-long and littered with musings and meanderings, some of which bring the narrative almost to a halt.

However, no book about Lewis could be dull. The travel writer spent his life foraging around some of the world's most dangerous places, from civil-war Spain to remote corners of Asia and drug-ravaged Latin America. From all of them Lewis returned vividly-written accounts which found their way into more than 30 books and many pieces of inspired journalism. I'm not alone in seeing Lewis as the equal of Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell. He was a superb reporter of the human condition under stress.

To describe Lewis's long life and huge body of work Evans divides his book into seven parts: Becoming; Being; Narrating; Loving; Reporting; Rewriting; Finishing. The titles may sound pretentious but the structure works. It's a decent way of handling the time-span involved, which is five years short of a century from Lewis's birth in the north London suburb of Enfield in 1908 to his death in a cottage hospital in Essex in 2003. The third son of Welsh-born parents, Lewis was born in 1908 in Essex and raised in a household that was haunted with grief after his two older brothers died in their teens. In 1919, Lewis won a scholarship to Enfield Grammar School. Evans describes the young Lewis as "tall, long-faced, a bit jug-eared, with a thick lash of hair and deep, curiously lazy eyes he had a well-cared for and well-dressed look".

After school Lewis worked in his father's chemist's shop while he scribbled entries to various literary competitions. Always interested in gadgets, together with his friend Alexander Hagen he set up a business that grew into a profitable chain of shops specialising in upmarket cameras.

But Lewis was restless to the bone. In 1931 he married Ernestina Corvaja, the daughter of Sicilian parents. Evans describes Ernestina as "charming, but imperious and demanding and a bit mad". The marriage produced one son - Ito - but was a troubled affair. The exotic Ernestina was the first of Lewis's three wives. She was followed by Hester Reid and Lesley Burley, by whom he had another two sons and two daughters.

For much of the 1930s Lewis ran his camera business, cheated on his wife, hurled his Bugatti Type 40 around race tracks and scribbled endlessly. After an arduous jaunt around Spain just before the civil war he produced a manuscript which he sold to the publisher Victor Gollancz. It was published in 1935 as Spanish Adventure and was well received. It was followed three years later by Sand And Sea In Arabia.

The outbreak of war found Lewis in Cuba, where he left his wife and son (for their safety, he said) and returned to England to enlist. He found a slot in the Intelligence Corps which dispatched him to French North Africa and then to Italy, where he found the inspiration for Naples '44 (published in 1978), the book that many regard as his masterwork. It tells the story of people scraping a living in a half-ruined ancient city that had been overrun by conquering foreign armies.

After the war Lewis found his voice. For 30 years he travelled incessantly and published book after book. Among the better known: The Volcanoes Above Us (1957); A Small War Made To Order (1966); The Sicilian Specialist (1974); An Empire In The East (1993); In Sicily (2000). All this was interspersed with journalism for titles such as the New Yorker, the Sunday Times, the New Statesman and Granta.

Lewis's domestic life never ceased to be turbulent. He went from wife to mistress to one night stand and back to wife again, fathering children as he went. Norman Lewiswas an expert seducer of young women. He was well-heeled, well-dressed, well-connected, drove an expensive car, had a grand London flat and was full of stories from the planet's more exotic places. To many an impressionable girl Lewis must have seemed like the Indiana Jones of his day.

In later life, Lewis developed Alzheimer's disease. "The symptoms of his condition came and went," Evans writes. "He developed sudden dislikes for people, mainly men (such as his daughters' partners), was rude to old friends and then would approve of them once they'd gone, and reacted disproportionately. His daughter Kiki one day touched him unexpectedly with her hand; he threatened to break her fingers." LewisHe died in the Saffron Walden Community Hospital on July 22, 2003 at the age of 96. With his last breath he called for "Monty, Monty", the dead brother he hadn't seen since he was seven years old.

This thoroughly good biography is marred only by Evans's philosophising. Here he is on Lewis's boyhood interest in firearms: 'Why would a writer renowned for the pastoral urgency of his writing and a pacifist attitude to the world, show such enthusiasm for guns?' he intones. 'The answer probably lies in his early adolescence, Whatever else they represented, guns for Norman symbolised in their borderline lawlessness a version of freedom'.

Oh, really? I'd say it was simpler than that. In a post-war period such as the one in which Lewis grew up boys learn about weaponry. Certainly I and every other nine-year-old in north Edinburgh in the late 1940s knew that a British-made Sten gun was inclined to jam, that a Webley revolver was useless at more than 20 yards and that the there were only two reliable ways to kill a man with a commando knife (under the ribs or across the throat). Reading it, I grew steadily more irritated by the ruminations. Still, they're not hard to skip, and Evans has come up with a huge amount of material that sheds light on the life and work of a fascinating man. At its core, and stripping out the literary/philosophical flourishes, this is one of the best biographies I've read for some time. There are plenty of photographs of Norman Lewis (and family), an extensive bibliography and a very decent index (although I would have appreciated a 'timeline' of Lewis's life and work).

The tribute I would pay to Julian Evans's book is this: i