I’m always pleased when one of my beloved lad-mags pauses from its barrage of plugs for $50,000 wristwatches and full-page ads for cigarettes in order to talk about books; it’s slightly encouraging to me, that the editors of these magazines sometimes think that in addition to grotesquely expensive status-symbol gimcracks and incipient lung cancer, young men should aspire to feed their largely empty minds with some good writing.

And it’s extra-satisfying when the writing those editors single out actually is good, as was the case in the latest issue of Men’s Journal, which devotes two pages to an interview by Darren Reidy with a mighty fine writer of both fiction and nonfiction, British expat Lawrence Osborne, author of a bunch of really good books, including The Ballad of a Small Player, The Wet and the Dry, and his terrific new book Hunters in the Dark. Lawrence Osborne lives on the outskirts of Bangkok, and his instant summary of the place when Reidy asks him about it aligns perfectly with my own memories of the place:

Well, it’s fucking hot. It’s 95 into the night, so I usually work after dark. It’s cooler, and you have the beautiful sounds of frogs and cicadas. I’m in a very jungly area here – mango trees, wild peacocks. It’s not the bright lights side of Bangkok, although all of that is very close by. So I work until around 2 am, and then I go down into the seething masses and get some street food, beers. Also, it’s very feminine here. At midnight, women outnumber men three to one on the street.

I could listen to Lawrence Osborne natter on about pretty much anything, but Reidy seems to zero in on his best subject right away – drinking – and asks him about drinking in Muslim countries, getting a typically blunt response:

Absolutely, and in all Muslim countries. Go to Bahrain on the weekend, when all the Saudis drive over. It’s like Caligula’s Rome. You can spend a weekend in a five-star hotel and listen to the Arab guys trashing their rooms. It makes Vegas look like a Salvation Army hospital. And then they all have to drive back on a Sunday night. Most of them are shitfaced, and they have to wait until they’re sober. Pakistan is like that as well. There’s absolutely no moderation in the consumption of alcohol.

It’s only with the final question that the interview made me grimace a bit. Reidy follows up that great revelation about hard-drinking Saudis by … well, I’m still not sure where this twist comes from:

Why the hypocrisy?

Clearly alcohol is a symbolic thing, because 40 years ago you could drink anywhere in the Middle East, no big deal. It’s some crisis in a world dominated by seemingly Western values. But why hasn’t that same crisis happened in Japan and Thailand? In the Far East, these cultures have been able to absorb Western influence without any neurotic fallout. They feel a level of security in their own culture, or they’re indifferent. But that’s just my opinion. I’m just someone who likes to drink.

Dominated by Western values? Why hasn’t the same crisis happened in Japan? This was all pretty confusing – it’s as if neither Reidy nor Osborne is even aware of the Iranian Revolution spearheaded by illiterate sociopath Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979, in which one maniac and a small cadre of zealots managed to drag a modern-day country back to the 8^th century, managed it mainly because the men who found themselves every day in those early weeks within arm’s reach of Khomeini – men who just a month before had been enjoying their weekly New Yorker, their I Love Lucy reruns on TV, and yes, their freedom to drink – didn’t simply kill the vicious old lunatic and hope his glassy-eyed followers then came to their senses. The fact that Saudi businessmen have to travel across state lines in order to enjoy themselves has nothing to do with the “hypocrisy” Reidy mentions, and certainly nothing to do with Osborne’s vague invocation “Western values.” It’s purely because of modernity-rejecting religious fundamentalism.

But you should all still read Hunters in the Dark. No Lawrence Osborne book, in fact, should be missed.