Dispatches from the frontline of factual insanity; I am Alive and You are Dead: a journey into the mind of Philip K Dick by Emmanuel Carrée

In the introduction to Like a Fiery Elephant, his fascinating study of B S Johnson, Jonathan Coe quotes Milan Kundera's sceptical assessment of the value of literary biography.

In the introduction to Like a Fiery Elephant, his fascinating study of B S Johnson, Jonathan Coe quotes Milan Kundera's sceptical assessment of the value of literary biography. Given that "the novelist destroys the house of his life and uses its stones to build the house of his novel", the eminent Czech argues, how tenuous must be the validity of those who set themselves to "undo what a novelist has done" and "redo what he undid"?

Coe rises to Kundera's challenge by inviting his readers to "take a wander together through the rubble, perhaps shaking our heads in awe and wonderment at the melancholy grandeur of the ruins we find there". Emmanuel Carrère's approach is somewhat less scrupulous. His mission is to tarmac over the bombsite of Philip K Dick's life in the hope of creating a convenient parking space for the overloaded pantechnicon of his own authorial genius.

"Were I writing a novel," Carrère informs us grandly, "I would have no qualms about extrapolating at this point." Would that extrapolation were the end of it. In between bemoaning the inadequacies of critical responses to his own fiction, and casually writing off Dick's early "mainstream" (ie non sci-fi) output - for many people the cornerstone of his literary legacy - as "sloppily written, turgid, full of inanely portentous dialogue", Carrère does at one point find it within himself to congratulate his subject on having "done a nice job" at a particular moment in his magisterial 59-novel oeuvre.

But beyond that reluctant concession, any reader who starts this book without already knowing that Philip K Dick is a writer whose body of work stands comparison with any of the great 20th-century literary figures, from Beckett to Burroughs, from James Joyce to Angela Carter, will finish it little, if any, the wiser. Those who come to Carrère's bizarre exercise in self-aggrandisement better prepared, having read the superior Philip K Dick biography which is already in existence - Laurence Sutin's authoritative and hugely entertaining Divine Invasions - will have all the more cause to be appalled by the Frenchman's effrontery.

The professed intention of I am Alive and You are Dead is to examine the life of its subject "from the inside". In practice, this means adopting the condescending tone of one of those magazine profiles in which journalists presume to speak with the inner voices of their subjects, while ransacking Dick's writings and experiences for evidence of his presumed inability to distinguish between his life and his art. Carrère's book The Adversary achieved a measure of success by applying this same disreputable "psychological" technique to the true story of a celebrated French fraudster-turned-murderer. But it just won't wash here.

It won't wash first and foremost because we are all living inside Philip K Dick's mind already. Not only as a consequence of the remarkable extent to which his works have shaped the cinematic imagination - from Blade Runner to The Matrix, from The Truman Show to pretty much every film Charlie Kaufman or Spike Jonze have ever worked on - but also (more spookily) since it is hard to come up with a single element of contemporary reality which has not been prefigured somewhere within the limitless expanses of Dick's imagination.

"Whenever Phil re-read one of his own novels," Carrère sneers, "he was inevitably stunned by the prophetic nature of his writing." He'd have had to be mad not to be. Sutin - after intensive consultation with mental healthcare professionals who had dealt with Dick at the most difficult times of his life (including the aftermath of the visionary episode of February 1974, wherein the Christian fish pendant worn by the woman delivering his medication prompted a shattering religious revelation) - concluded that he "was not crazy by any standard that I would dare apply". Carrère begs to differ.

Yet the harder he strives to boil down Dick's maverick genius to a conventional pathology of drug-induced paranoia and mental illness, the more stubbornly it resists such simplification. By an irony of aptly Dickian proportions, this book's real value comes not so much in Carrère's vain attempts to penetrate the wilds of the author's psyche, as in the connections he makes between Philip K Dick's work and the counter-cultural milieu which sustained it.

From the spaced-out house-guest in Dick's Californian apartment, striving to teach his parrot to say the words "I don't understand what they've made me say", to the tragic death of Dick's friend Bishop James A Pike, the heretical episcopalian Bishop of California, who drove into the Palestinian desert in a rented Ford Cortina with two bottles of Coca-Cola for sustenance, these despatches from the frontline of factual insanity send you back to the fiction with a clearer sense of where its author was coming from. And in the end, it's the tantalising glimpses Emmanuel Carrère supplies of the world outside the mind of Philip K Dick that redeem some - though not all - of this book's myriad indulgences.

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