Wide-eyed in the Desert

...One Qatari, while being interviewed, set his pen to drawing "an automatic, absent-minded labyrinth ". Often Arabia is less about the places the author visits than about Raban himself When he observes that Arabic "is a language of pure manners in which there are hardly any literal meanings at all and in which symbolic gesture is everything," his mind has evidently wandered from Arab realities, through the Looking Glass, and into the landscape he so loves to dwell in...

...Raban does greater justice to Cairo, where his perception of a wounded civilization inspires his most sensitive writing "Apart from the hustlers, everybody looked tired, educated and hungry," he notes Then he describes the struggle of the underemployed, underpaid intelligentsia to keep their minds and bodies alive in a crowded, broken-down, politically repressive metropolis that was once the intellectual capital of the Arab world...

...For a while Raban, like Alice, is an excellent guide through the surreal landscape But this pose eventually wears thin Raban describes with wit and beauty the twists and turns of the "labyrinth" he finds Arab culture to be, but he rarely rises above its walls to provide a wider perspective His anecdotes and observations often lack the poignancy intended because they are not anchored to a more serious discussion of the role of Islam, the political climate, and the social and economic conditions of the countries he visits...

...This kind of frivolousness is, I think, partly a product of the Western notion that the Third World has entered middle age The high hopes we held only recently for its future have been undermined in part by corruption, cruelty and absurdity that seem so entrenched in much of Asia, Africa and Latin America And this disillusionment is implicit in the tone of the recent rash of casual, cynical, unflattering accounts of journeys through those regions...

...He is less moved by a relatively tranquil and prosperous Jordan, and the result is Arabia's weakest chapter Finding poverty and social ills conspicuously absent wherever he goes in the country, he can only echo the words of a British consul "'Being all right' is the Jordanian habit of mind " The entire nation, it seems, has recently returned from a self-fulfillment workshop in California, even "the Palestinian camps looked as if the refugees, too, were determinedly being all right ". Raban neglects to tell us that Jordan's prosperity is courtesy of the coffers of the oil-rich nations and the United States Nor does he mention that this very recent influx of aid has hardly eradicated all of Jordan's problems Instead, he prefers to mystify its well-being and play Alice in Nirvana-land...

...To Raban's credit, this is not a malicious book The sarcasm is mild, and tempered by moments of admiration and optimism What Arabia sorely lacks is the resonance that can come only from the efforts of an author possessing a greater commitment to and familiarity with the cultures he is observing In other words, Jonathan Raban has written a travel book that is as much a product of its time as the tomes of Victorian Orientalists were of theirs...

...Starting his journey in the sheikdoms of the Arabian Gulf, Raban is astounded by what he finds No statistics or stones could have prepared him for the spectacle of these recently isolated desert cultures in the throes of sudden entry into the 20th century In Bahrain, "sea was being turned into land, oil into gasoline, prawns into frozen packets, base metal into shiny tubes and pipes, and along the sides of every road, men were bashing at pavements with pickaxes and sledgehammers for no apparent reason " The frenetic pace of development is unchecked by any skepticism toward the modern metropolis "With its floodlit facades and illuminated skeletons of wonders vet to come, the city [Abu Dhabi] had all the vigor and likability of an experimental society ". Although dazzled by its vitality, Raban thinks about the guinea pigs in this "experiment," the crossover generation of Arabs for whom "the past was a mound of dust, the future a skeleton " He suggests that "perhaps the present existed as a sort of station waiting room where people gathered to waste an hour or two between trains The future was late, not due until tomorrow, meanwhile the passengers were marooned among their piles of baggage ". Raban quotes often from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and the allusions are appropriate He wishes above all to capture the fantastic, mirage-like aura of these paradoxical places Moving from one casual encounter to the next, he is a wide-eyed Alice in a futuristic wonderland...

...Wide-eyed in the Desert Arabia: A Journey Through the Labyrinth By Jonathan Raban Simon & Schuster 344 pp $1195 Reviewed by Eric Goldstein Arabia is a clever title for the story of an Englishman's recent travels through various Arab states, an archaic term, it summons up a long literary tradition of English visitors to the Orient The tables have indeed been turned since the days of Richard Burton, Charles Doughty and T E Lawrence London, once the capital of the Empire on which the sun never set, is now being colonized by the Arabs But Jonathan Raban has in a way continued the tradition by traversing Arabia Deserta to see just what the petrodollar has wrought on the Noble Savages of his mentors...

...Occasionally, the easy-going candor simply lapses into irreverence Raban's beloved labyrinth metaphor is a good example Throughout the chapters on the Arabian Peninsula, this image is trotted out as shorthand for all that is inscrutable and exotic in Arab culture Thus the quaint but erroneous analysis of Arabian urban design "Desert people, looking for protection in the city, instinctively construct mazes around themselves " Later, without offering any supporting evidence, Raban decides that "the larger structure of Arab society was-unlike the vertical hierarchies of the West—a labyrinth too " This fetish even takes on structuralist overtones Give an Arab scratch paper and what will he doodle...

...In short, Arabia is clearly not the work of one of the old-school Arabisttravelers, whose knowledge of and passion for their subject permeated each page they wrote It has more in common with Paul Theroux's Old Patagonian Express and Shiva Naipaul's North of South What such absorbing accounts lack in sustained depth they compensate for with casts of quirky characters and then evocation of spirit of place In the spirit of the genre, Arabia is a light, anecdotal report by a mordantly witty young writer of a jaunt through countries he does not necessarily know intimately...