Florence of Arabia: A Novel (Paperback)

~ (Author)
Key Phrases: religious police, Delame Noir, Uncle Sam, Middle East (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

One has to admire the pluck of an author who dares satirize what may be the touchiest subject in the country today: Arab American relations. Buckley (No Way to Treat a First Lady, etc.) jumps into the sandstorm feet first with this tale of scrappy Florence Farfaletti, Deputy to the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Near East Affairs. When a friend of Florence's who is married to Prince Bawad of Wasabia is executed, Florence proposes a plan to free the women of the Middle East. Covertly accepted by the U. S. Government, the plan involves creating a TV station in Wasabia's neighboring country, Matar, which instigates a revolution with broadcasts that, among other things, encourage women to throw off their burkas. Humor and action are in great supply, and reader Kalember (whom 40-somethings may remember as Susannah Hart from the series Thirtysomething) handles both with aplomb. The serene stability of her voice is a good foil for the story's calamitous happenings but, at the same time, her voice conveys a certain vulnerability and righteousness that makes her portrayal of Florence completely believable. As an added bonus, Kalember's delivery of the English-as-a-second-language Arab characters is both sympathetic and hilarious.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.

From The Washington Post

In these parlous times it takes more than courage to do what Christopher Buckley sets out to do in his new farce; it takes a devil-may-care spirit somewhere between serenity and madness.

Florence of Arabia is very funny in places, and even devastating in the aggregate. To call Buckley irreverent doesn't do justice to reverence. What is more, this delightfully improbable tale is propelled by a noble purpose -- gender justice in an oppressive theocracy -- that could (Buckley can hope) inoculate him from attack and reprimand. But for me, what dominates this story is its elaborate mockery of the culture and faith of tens of millions of people, people who have reason to be sensitive these days about such irreverence as well as a troublesome record of reacting to it.

Muslims, I mean, in a big wedge of the Arab world. So a non-Muslim's laughter at many of the fine riffs and caricatures in Florence of Arabia is necessarily awkward laughter. Yucks as un-PC as these have not been heard in many a year, and certainly not for the last three, anywhere outside the mouth-foaming sectors of public discourse. Florence of Arabia -- and what a wonderful title! -- concerns the Royal Kingdom of Wasabia, a vast and oil-rich desert land ruled by a vast and oil-rich royal family. Its oppressive power is guaranteed by optimum connections to the American establishment greased by a suave prince as its longtime ambassador in Washington. Wasabia's medieval legal system, among other things, subjugates, humiliates and violates women, as well as executing them for such vices as flirting.

Of course this is a wholly fictional land, too absurd to resemble any in the real family of nations.

A historian whom Buckley concocts describes Wasabia as the Middle East's preeminent "no-fun zone," unless "one's idea of fun includes beheading, amputation, flogging, blinding and having your tongue cut off for offenses that in other religions would earn you a lecture from the rabbi, five Hail Marys from a priest and, for Episcopalians, a plastic pink flamingo on your front lawn."

The neighboring emirate of Matar -- pronounced Mutter -- is an equally imaginary gulfside state ruled by, let us say, more relaxed standards of piety, including a mullah-sanctioned gambling and entertainment enclave called Infidel Land. The current emir's "handling of Matar's religious authorities had been, by unanimous consent, masterful. Matari mullahs . . . were so prosperous that they had acquired the local nickname of 'moolahs.' They received a generous salary from the state, luxury apartments, a new Mercedes-Benz every three years and an annual six-week paid sabbatical, which most of them chose to take in the South of France, one of Islam's holiest sites."

Florence Farfaletti, the scrappy, wisecracking leading gal of this tale, is a restless Foreign Service officer and angry ex-wife of a Wasabi. Beholding the umpteenth instance of violence being done to womenfolk there, Florence gets a cockamamie idea. She cooks up an ingenious plan to orchestrate the soft overthrow of the system -- the veil, the stoning, the works -- and liberate the women of Wasabia and beyond.

The State Department reels in horror, but, much to her surprise, an angel named Uncle Sam appears in her life, totally witting of her plan, and agrees to bankroll the idea. CIA? White House? Who knows? Who cares? He's got money and authority -- helicopters, even.

Florence of Arabia recruits a buffed-for-Hollywood team: "A hit man from Dogpatch, a PR hack, and a queer Foreign Service Officer," as the latter person cracks. They set up their field headquarters in Matar to carry out the ludicrous op, which mustn't be spoiled here. As it unfolds, its success is serially threatened by tense relations between Matar and Wasabia and the rivalrous meddling of the United States and France. Beyond the kingdom and emirate, Buckley leaves the Arab world alone and keeps a 10-foot-pole's length away from Israel. Otherwise he spreads the satire around with a generous pitchfork -- State Department stuffpots, K Street sleazebuckets, Capitol Hill blowhards, CIA crazies and -- what would we do without them? -- the French.

"Did not France have her own proud history of screwing things up? Look at Algeria, Vietnam, Syria, Haiti -- Quebec -- all still reeling from their days of French rule. Clearly, France was ready and eager to show the world that she, too, could wreak disastrous, unforeseen consequences abroad, far more efficiently and almost certainly with more flair than America."

As we saw in his earlier novels (Thank You for Smoking and No Way to Treat a First Lady among them), Buckley savors Washington for its straight-faced ridiculousness:

"Senators pounded their podia, demanding answers. The president declared that he, too, wanted answers. The CIA said that although it had no official comment, it, too, perhaps even more than the president and the senators, wanted answers. The secretary of state said that there might in fact be no answers, but if there were, he certainly would be interested in hearing them. The secretary general of the United Nations said that he was reasonably certain answers existed, but first the right questions must be asked, and then they would have to be translated, and this would take time."

Buckley keeps us entertained with clever japes and juicy bits, rashers of Thousand-and-One-Nights sexual innuendo, awe-inspiring passages of potted history. I like the titles of two imaginary books he mentions: volume XXI of Henry Kissinger's memoirs, "Years of Genius," and a philandering Arab prince's pensees, "The Seven Pillows of Wisdom." Such wit works well in Buckley's quick-off-the-mark short pieces in the New Yorker. Extending the riff makes other demands, as invention has to give way to sustaining narrative.

We can't help rooting for Florence and her Arab sisters as they take on the hapless sheiks and whoring princes and cold-blooded mukfellah enforcers, and it becomes clear that Buckley has fallen for Florence and her cause as well. The ridicule gives way to sweetness on the one hand and indignation on the other, sentiments you wouldn't expect from the seasoned cynic at the controls. Here's Buckley tut-tutting the harsh justice dealt to two women who walked uncovered and unchaperoned in the streets of Wasabia: "It was quite obvious, declared the mukfellah official who announced their sentences, that they had been on their way to fornicate with loathsome blackamoor cooks. There was no actual evidence of this, but the advantage of a religious judiciary is that you don't need evidence."

Christopher Buckley is likely to make some people very angry with this book, but there will be no denying the elegance and, by my lights, the essential gentleness of his wit. Buckley can be offensive -- sometimes uproariously so -- but I don't detect malice, or at least not much. Whether everyone else will read him this way is another question.

Reviewed by Charles Trueheart
Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks (September 13, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0812972260
• ISBN-13: 978-0812972269
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.2 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (37 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #63,966 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hilarious!, January 2, 2005

By	Patrick Carroll "Winebibber. Java/JEE Develo... (Atlanta, GA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Florence of Arabia: A Novel (Hardcover)

This was a quick fun read about a US State Department employee turned Agent Provocateur (yes, the French play a role) in a thinly-fictionalized Middle East.

I won't cover the plot points because I don't want to spoil the surprise. Suffice it that I laughed out loud when I saw the title in the "New Releases" section at B&N, read the first couple of chapters, bought it, and read it in an evening - laughing most of the way (there are some sad parts, but there are more outrageously funny ones.)

21 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars No Role for Peter O'Toole, December 25, 2004

By	John R. Linnell (New Gloucester, ME United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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This review is from: Florence of Arabia: A Novel (Hardcover)

Those who do not like this satrical novel, probably take themselves and their view of the world too seriously. Christopher Buckley has the gift of taking a situation and writing about it in a compelling and entertaining way which delivers more truth than fiction, often to the discomfort of those whose toes are trod on the hardest.

A character in the book, referred to as Uncle Sam, sums up the situation that has been created well into the book quite neatly when he opines: "As I recall, the mission was to empower Arab women and bring about some kind of stability in the Middle East. There were those who said, 'Are you out of your mind?' Others said, 'We've tried everything else, why not give it a shot? What harm can it do??" Ha! And how did it all turn out? With a coup detat - and how appropriate to use the French term for it - against the only stable country in the region. Not only did it not work, but it brought about the further enslavement of two point five million Arab women, along with the empwerment of a psychotic race-car driver, to say nothing of a whopping increase in Wasabi oil prices that may well determine the outcome of the next presidential election. And did I mention France getting naval bases in the Gulf?

And that's far from the end of the story.

It's a fun ride and done so very well. Hop on and enjoy the trip.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Buckley Persuades Like No One Else, July 10, 2006

By	Tomato Pie "tomatopie" (Yardley, PA USA) - See all my reviews

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I sought this book because Buckley is my favorite author. I began with "Thank You For Smoking" and then read all of his works. Until this tome, only "Little Green Men" matched the superb wit and wordplay of TYFS.

This may be Buckley's best work yet. While I read it for the laughs, this novel is both informative and persuasive on the political circumstances of the middle east. Moreso than any editorial or talking head, this book demonstrates both the madness of the sheiks and playboy princes of the middle east, not to mention the mullahs, but also the futility of western intervention.

In the final analysis, this book may stand alongside Gulliver's Travels in the annals of great satire.

Brilliant, and I can't wait for Buckley's next work.