The Wet and the Dry

Lawrence Osborne's new book of travel writing, The Wet and the Dry, begins and ends at ten past six in the evening. This is the precise hour which Osborne - novelist, travel writer, bon viveur, expat and permanent exile - believes to be the perfect moment for the night's first drink. And Osborne's love of the taste of that first drink, and of alcohol in its many forms, suffuses through this book like the burn of a good whiskey.

The basic idea is that Osborne traverses the globe and attempts to get drunk in all sorts of places where alcohol is supposedly taboo: Lahore, Oman, Malaysia, Cairo. This could end up as a laddish jape, but Osborne is too intelligent, too wise and too sad for that, his relationship to alcohol complicated by mistrust, dependency, hangover, and a hair-raising family history of alcoholism. It could also have ended up as a brash poke at the puritanical Orient, but Osborne, the permanent world-traveller, is more repelled by the puritanism of the West. What he uncovers, on his hilarious and often luminously sad adventures, is that alcohol is one of the great facts of humanity, as old as civilisation itsel, and a troublesome focus of desire, repression and abandon in relation to which every society likes to define itself. From towns in Malaysia were Osborne anticipates death as the possible outcome of a drink, to the endangered arak-dens of Cairo, from vineyards in the Lebanese hills threatened by the Wahabbis gathering in the hills to the grubby expat hangouts of Dubai - by way of a dry New Year in Oman in which he enters on the experience of sobriety as other writers might enter on a particularly destabilizing drug experience - Osborne gets as close as anyone has done to giving a portrait of our troubled global relationship with alcohol, and of a life lived in its ambivalent glow.