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Batting on the Bosphorus: A Liquor-fuelled Cricket Tour Through Eastern Europe, by Angus Bell, GreyStone, 352 pages, $22

Author's website: http://www.angusjjbell.com/4436.html

Just when I've grown weary of North American baby-boomer travelogues, those breathy accounts of languishing in expensive Provencal villas or identical, wine-sloshed tales set in Tuscany vineyards, along comes a twenty-something Scot with hilarious, unvarnished exploits of hard time spent in coarse, unfashionable Eastern Europe.

A few years ago, Scottish expat Angus Bell, a self-described “media slut” living in Montreal with his girlfriend, Candy (whose family owns a chocolate factory), went to a psychic expo in Old Montreal.

The shaman claimed to be channelling messages from Bell's Welsh great-uncle Ivan, who died as an infant: “You're going to lose your job, leave the country and put together a book or a movie.”

Bell found great-uncle Ivan's messages via the psychic actually started to come true. Back in Scotland with his Québécoise girlfriend after losing his magazine job, the words “cricket” and “Ukraine” began to bounce around his skull, and Google soon was involved. To his surprise, Bell finds cricket leagues at Odessa State Medical University – and many more around Eastern Europe.

Now it's almost time to quit his day job at Glasgow's worst methadone clinic and hit the road to fulfill the psychic's predictions. “By day, I dealt with track-suited man-beaters and pregnant fourteen-year-olds who mixed their baby milk with custard. By night, I planned the forthcoming cricket season. I stayed up all hours in the flat, firing off e-mails to Belarus, Serbia, Slovenia, and Ukraine, pleading they let me come and play ... Shortly, my first summer game was inked onto the calendar: Poland versus ‘Pakistan from Warsaw or Berlin,' May 24.”

Like it promises on the cover, Bell's first book, Batting on the Bosphorus , is an 8,000-mile liquor-fuelled trip in his trusty Czech-made Skoda, the trunk filled with cricket paraphernalia to distribute to new players like a Christian missionary's zeal with newly minted bibles. His very funny book is also packed with obscure cricket lore and the political back story on every country he drives through over the next two months.

Bell, on a budget of only 1,500 quid from the Scottish Arts Council and no book deal in place, is forced to sleep in crumbling Eastern European hostels crammed with peripatetic, dope-smoking dirtbags from Australia, Britain and any other tourist-friendly First World country that charges too much for a pub table of pints and a square meal these days.

There's no better place to pluck these story-rich travellers from than a hostel in a shop-worn region like Eastern Europe, where you can kindly offer them a ride to the next country while they spill.

Like A.A. Gill, another Scottish-born travel writer with a gimlet eye, Bell's participatory journalism is immersed in snappy, concise observations that create genuine belly laughs.

It's not just the British, Australian and South Asian expats who meet up with Bell for a cricket match around Eastern Europe. So do a few unusual locals that have started clubs, fascinated by this English precursor to baseball, in countries where the Brits never pressed down their colonial boots: Slovakia, Bulgaria and the Ukraine, to name a few.

First in print in November, 2006, as a self-published British version titled Slogging the Slavs , Bell makes Batting on the Bosphorus even more hilarious because he has a cunning way of extracting stories out of many of his subjects like a clever private detective offering bribes for information.

While renting a room for a few days at a visibly religious older lady's home in Dubrovnik, Croatia, Bell is interviewed on her phone by Phil, from London. Phil is the host of a BBC Radio open-line program, and he's amazed by Bell's outrageous stories about local cricket players only nine countries and 3,000 miles into this cricketer hero's journey.

“Wow! How are you getting these stories out of the players?” BBC Phil inquires.

“It's quite simple, Phil. I take them down to the pub over the course of four days and ply them with alcohol.” There's the “liquor-fuelled” component of Bell's cricket tour book.

Bell may drink like a Scot, but this 5-foot, 8-inch firebrand writes gonzo journalism like a younger, kilted version of Hunter S. Thompson or P.J. O'Rourke. He also confesses to being stricken with the vegetarian affliction that many twenty-somethings currently follow, yet I'm willing to overlook this because he has some memorable stories to relate.

Bell keenly observes and writes about those subtle, often ironic nuances in foreign countries, tinged with a hilarious hint of misanthropy that O'Rourke also did so well in books like Holidays in Hell and his international correspondent dispatches for Rolling Stone magazine.

Even if you've never picked up a cricket bat, Batting on the Bosphorus is a great read from a very funny wee man. For too long, Canadian letters has been suspiciously devoid of a bold, BS-free voice since the irascible Mordecai Richler bought his last pack of smokes in 2001.

We can only hope this Scottish expat hangs around Mordecai's Montreal to pen more hilarious books about his future exploits.

D. Grant Black is a Saskatchewan freelance writer, editor and travel journalist who plans to join a cricket club this spring.