The Village Book, by Nicolas Freeling

A vagabond's bolt-hole in the heart of Europe

This is an odd memoir, and an oddly endearing one, by the creator of those very European police inspectors, Van der Valk and Henri Castang. Nicolas Freeling's village is Grandfontaine, a sprawl of houses and abandoned industrial buildings in a Vosges valley west of Strasbourg. Here, on the border between Alsace and Lorraine, Freeling and his Dutch wife bought an old stone farmhouse, 35 years ago. Initially a weekend retreat – their five children were at school in Strasbourg – the "horrible house", damp and inconvenient, became the permanent lair this self-confessed vagabond had been seeking since childhood.

The first 80 pages set the scene as Freeling, now in his mid-seventies and beset by illnesses, reviews his life. With the psychological acuity and wry humour familiar from the novels, he looks back at his mother's irresponsible behaviour: her early flirting with communism, her total immersion in Catholicism. Although the portrait is affectionate, Freeling still rails against the childhood trauma caused by her decision, days before the outbreak of the Second World War, to bolt to Ireland. Uprooted from his Jesuit prep school, the 12-year-old felt a traitor.

He sees Grandfontaine's position as pivotal. On the border of four French departments, it stands right at the centre of Europe: the bronze compass planted on a nearby mountain top by the Kaiser's surveyor points one way to St Petersburg, the other to Madrid.

The picture of the village is far from rosy. The people are mainly dour, taciturn and unsmiling, as suspicious of foreigners as 35 years ago: it's interesting to read this in the context of Alsace's recent high vote for Le Pen. Musing on local mentalities, he relates with a crimewriter's relish the true story of the drowning of "Little Gregory", a gripping drama of poison-pen letters and clan vendettas that sold newspapers for years in France.

Yet this inward-looking place "forged me into a European": as likely to refer to Goethe or Proust, Pascal or Nathalie Sarraute as to his father's beloved Conrad and his own favourite, Kipling. A one-time chef, he offers caustic insights into culinary habits: he suspects the foodie culture in England is a passing fashion; fulminates against French butchers' avaricious refusal to hang meat properly; and deplores the "disgustingly poor quality" of Alsace charcuterie.

He is engagingly frank about his failings. His impulsive lack of judgement, his inclination to bolt, are clearly inherited from his mother; his hopelessness with money he shared with both parents. His life-long lack of energy is all his own, though it hasn't prevented his creating an extraordinary garden out of unpromising terrain.

Occasionally repetitive, always entertaining, this is an old man's book – like Freeling's most recent novel, Some Time Tomorrow, as perceptive a picture as you are likely to encounter of the impact of age and illness on the male psyche. The two can profitably be read side by side, as a prelude to publication in the autumn of Freeling's 38th novel, The Janeites.