The Wet and the Dry: A Drinker's Journey

 by Lawrence Osborne – review

Lawrence Osborne drinks his way across the Islamic world, occasionally shamefully and always unapologetically

Lawrence Osborne: 'refreshingly unapologetic'.

In Beirut, Lawrence Osborne meets Jacques Tabet, the city's "most cantankerous and generous bar owner". Tabet says, while pouring Osborne a succession of drinks: "I hate being sober. It's a state that irritates me, as I'm sure it irritates you. If I had been sober all these years I would not have survived." Osborne also notes that the bar he runs allows smoking: "A bar for adults, then, and not for screaming moralistic children."

1. The Wet And The Dry: A Drinker's Journey
2. by Lawrence Osborne
3.  

One can imagine that life in Beirut during Lebanon's civil war would have called for the occasional morale-stiffener. But it is the proximity of the Muslim world that interests Osborne. Although in this book there are accounts of bars from all over the world – he begins in the Town House Galleria in Milan, where a gin and tonic costs €40 – it is the disapproval of Islam, and the furtive attempts to circumvent the restrictions on drinking alcohol, to which this book largely returns. The idea, he says out loud one evening, is to dry out, to see if non-drinkers have anything to teach him, but this is flannel to a degree as much of his recounted time is spent trying to find a shebeen where he can score a drink – any kind of drink will do, it would appear, even if it is vile, as long as it has a kick. The dangers faced include not only severe and degrading punishment from the authorities, but, across unnervingly wide stretches of the globe, being torn to pieces by the shrapnel of a fundamentalist-primed bomb. Indeed he manages to evade this last fate by mere seconds in Indonesia, although the jihadists' target was a cash machine rather than a bar.
Osborne is a master of the high style. In this the prose sometimes recalls the precise movements of the drunkard anxious not to seem drunk. This is always fun to watch, but sometimes the effect betrays itself. The drinker, he writes in one sonorous passage, is "a self-critic, a connoisseur of his own altered states, he knows exactly how to tweak himself upwards and downwards. He is an amateur alchemist when it comes to the drinks themselves. If he is a writer, and wanted to explain himself to strangers, he would write a book called In Praise of Intoxification. No one would invite him to explain his views in public." Note that "intoxification" is not actually a word. Is Osborne's slip deliberate, or was he intoxified when he wrote it? Still, one knows what he means, as one thinks one does when he describes the differing effects of fermented drinks and distilled ones: "A fermentation excites and fills one with optimism and lust; a distillation makes one morose, sceptical and withdrawn." Which sounds plausible until one recalls plenty of instances in which the reverse can be the case.
Osborne is, it turns out, a fairly unrepentant drunk, happy, so to speak, to call himself an alcoholic, but refreshingly unapologetic about his condition; and aware that his intoxification can lead him to dreadful, occasionally shameful behaviour, some of which he is unable to recall the next day. But we are largely spared the woeful self-flagellation of the misery memoir (substance-abusers' section), of which we have now surely read enough to be getting on with. One may question the wisdom or even sanity of some of the passages, as we may question the  wisdom or sanity, or even manners, of going to Islamabad "in order to try and get drunk there", but you can't deny his journey is an entertaining one.




Source:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/mar/24/lawrence-osborne-drinkers-journey-review?CMP=twt_fd

 

• • Nicholas Lezard
  • The Observer, Sunday 24 March 2013