Florence of Arabia: A Novel by Christopher Buckley

Florence of Arabia: A Novel by Christopher Buckley, (Random House: New York; 2004), 272 pages, ISBN-10: 1400062233.

In Florence of Arabia: A Novel, Christopher Buckley satirizes the practice and practitioners of United States foreign policy in the Middle East. Buckley’s approach is to demonstrate the impact of United States’ ill-thought-out, bumbling, inappropriate, and poorly executed imposition of American’s beliefs and modern progressive views in two fictional Middle East countries.

Buckley’s satire focuses on a career State Department diplomat (Florence Farfalitti) and her single-minded devotion to her career. This devotion appears to be at the exclusion of everything else: she appears to have no family, spouse, or interests outside her career. Florence’s life changes when she becomes part of a diplomatic incident where a wife of a prominent Middle Eastern diplomat approaches her seeking asylum in the United States. The wife is denied asylum, is returned to her home country, and publically beheaded. Florence is outraged by her country’s abandonment of her friend, the asylum seeker. Her outrage spurs her into frenzied activity that produces a policy document outlining plans for changes to the United States Middle East policy to one where female emancipation/liberty/equal are discussed, supported and encouraged. The bosses in the State Department angrily reject Florence’s proposals; however, she is privately recruited by un-named American backers in a secret mission to impose equal rights for women in the fictional Middle East emirate of Matar, the “Switzerland of the Gulf.” She recruits a varied team of experts to implement her plan via the medium of television. Her television station targets repressed Middle Eastern women through a provocative line-up of programs that includes “The Thousand and One Mornings,” a day-time talk show that features self-defense tips to be used by women against their boyfriends during Ramadan. There is also a popular soap opera that features characters that appear to be based on the Matar royal family. There is also a situation comedy about an inept but ruthless squad of religious police.

Florence’s plan, once implemented, changes the Middle East, but not in the way she intended. While the television station programming is very popular and profitable, it provokes a religious backlash against the television station, its staff, the ruling regime of Matar, and eventually a political struggle for the control of the emirate. Chaos, death and an uprising ensue.

The targets of Buckley’s satire in Florence of Arabia are the practitioners of United States foreign policy. Diplomats are hilariously portrayed as dithering do-nothings, whose obsequiousness and timidity towards ruthless tyrannical allies results in the death of persons who seek nothing but liberty. On the other hand, activist diplomats that seek to plant the succulent root of women’s equality in the barren soil of the Middle East end up causing turmoil, instability, death, and harm to the cause they originally intended to promote. Florence of Arabia is fiction/satire: nothing like this could ever happen in real life, could it? To this reviewer, it triggers memories of previous administrations’ “doing God’s work” in Somalia, and expanding democracy in the Middle East, by imposing it on Iraq. Florence of Arabia is both engaging and humorous, while simultaneously appearing as though it could be a non-fictional, cautionary tale for those starry-eyed idealists seeking to change the world for the better through diplomacy.