with eight other items, most of themshot in Lyon. And all this was donewithin the lifetimes of some still surviv-ing people.

C'hardere explained that various spe-cial exhibits run continually—I saw agood one of still photography by some-one new—and that there are always filmseries in progress. The current series ison the subject of actors: the poster fea-tures Brando and Garbo. He showedme tiie very inviting small screen-ing room downstairs, with comfortablescarlet-uph(3lstered seats that, he says,are filled almost every day for the filmprograms.

Then Chardere loaded me withposters and postcards, pamphlets andbrochtires, and put me in the car that hehad sttmmoned to take me back to myhotel—a good distance because the insti-tute is in an outlying district. (CalledMonplaisir. Ah, those Lyonnaises.) Thisis my note of tlianks.

Since then, I've been thinking of thatday less as a trip to a museum than as avisit to some people whom I was too lateto catch. The richness and generosity ofthe villa itself seem to reflect the warmthof the people who lived there. Whatexcitement those rooms must haveknown- in those days when a new age wasin birth. I ielt that I had sensed it during

my visit. Fanciful, of course, but that'swhat fancy is for.

A screenwriter sends a letter of objec-tion to my point in a recent piece aboutthe scarcity of good scripts as against theplenitude of good acting and directing.This man isn't making the usual casethat there are good scripts out there thataren't being done—something that play-wrights also charge. He says, and I sawthe film he's speaking of. that after thescript is written, a lot of other handsreach in to mess it up, and the writergets blamed. I'm sure that this is true inmany instances, and I'm also sure that,for critics, there's nothing to be doneabout it. All we can go by is the credit asgiven. Anything else would lead torumor-mongering and to other tmfair-nesses in other directions.

I once praised a director for a certainshot, and he told me that his assistanthad suggested it. So, every time we say,'The direction is by X," we otight to besaying, "The direction is attributed toX." The same pattern applies to writers.But to tise that pattern every time wouldbe unfair when it isn't true, and anywayit's too clumsy. All I can add is that, roho-evefh responsible for the current screen-plays of the world, most of them aredreadful. •

The Oil Encounter and the novel.

PetrofidionBY AMITAV GHOSH

I f the Spice Trade has anytwentieth-century equivalent,it can (inly be the oil industry.In its economic and strategic

value, as well as its ability to generate far-flung political, military, and culturalencotmters, oil is clearly the only com-modity that can serve as an analogy forpepper. In all matters technical, ofcourse, the comparison is weightedgrossly in favor of oil. But in at least onedomain it is the Spice Trade that canclaim the clear advantage: in the qualityof the literature that it nurtured.

Within a few decades of the discoveryof the sea route to India, the Portuguesepoet Luis de Canioes had produced theLusiads, the epic poem that chronicledVasco da Gama's voyage and in effect

AMIIAV GHOSH is the author mostrecently of The Shadoxv Lines (Penguin).

conjured Portugal into literary nation-hood. The Oi! Encounter, on the otherhand, has produced scarcely a singlework of note. In English, for example, ithas generated litde apart from somemore or less second-rate travel literatureand a vast amount of academicephemera—nothing remotely of thequality or the intellectual distinction ofthe travelogues and narratives producedby such sixteenth-centtiry Porttiguesewriters as Duarte Barbosa, Tome Pires,and Caspar Correia. As for an epicpoem, the very idea is ludicrous: to theprincipal protagonists in the OilEncounter (which means, in effect,America and Americans on the onehand and the peoples of the ArabianPeninsula and the Persian Gulf on theother), the history of oil is a matter ofemharrassment verging on the unspeak-able, tlie pornographic. It is perhaps die

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one cultural issue on which the twosides are in complete agreement.

Still, if the Oil Encounter has provedbarren, it is surely through no fault of itsown. It would be hard to imagine a storythat is its equal in drama, or in historicalresonance. Consider its Livingstonianbeginnings: the Westerner with hiscaravan-loads of machines and instru-ments thrusting himself unannouncedupon small, isolated communities, deepwithin some of the most hostile envi-ronments on earth. And think of thepostmodern present: city-states wherevirtually everyone is a "foreigner";admixtures of peoples and cultures on ascale never before envisaged; vicious sys-tems of helotry juxtaposed with unparal-leled wealth; deserts transformed bytechnology and military devastation onan apocalyptic scale.

It is a story that evokes horror, sympa-thy, guilt, rage, and a great deal else,depending on the listener's situation.The one thing that can be said of it withabsolute certainty is that no one any-where who has any thought either forhis conscience or his self-preservationcan afford to ignore it. So why, whenthere is so much to write about, has thisencounter proved so imaginatively ster-ile?

O n the American side, theanswers are not far toseek. To a great manyAmericans, oil smells bad.

lt reeks of unavoidable overseas entan-glements, a worrisome foreign depen-dency, economic uncertainty, risky andexpensive military enterprises; of thou-sands of dead civilians and children andall the troublesome questions that lieburied in their graves. Bad enough atstreet level, the smell of oil gets a lotworse by the time it seeps into thoserooms where serious fiction is writtenand read. It acquires more than just awhiff of that deep suspicion of the Araband Muslim worlds that wafts through somuch of American intellectual life. Andto make things still worse, it begins tosmell of pollution and environmentalhazards. It reeks, it stinks, it becomes aProblem that can be written about onlyin the language of Solutions.

But tliere are other reasons why thereisn't a Great American Oil Novel, andsome of them lie hidden witliin the in.sti-tutions that shape American writingtoday. It would be hard indeed to imag-ine the writing school that could teachits graduates to find their way throughthe uncbarted firmaments of the OilEncounter. In a way, the professionaliza-tion of fiction has had much the sameeffect in America as it had in Britain inanother imperial age: as though in pre-cise counterpoint to the increasing geo-

graphical elasticity of the country'sinvolvements, its fictional gaze hasturned inward, becoming ever moreintrospective, ever more concentratedupon its own self-defmidon. In otherwords, it has fastened upon a stock ofthemes and subjects each of which isaccompanied by a well-tested pedagogictechnology. Try and imagine a majorAmerican writer taking on the OilEncounter. The idea is literally incon-ceivable.

It isn't fair, of course, to point the fin-ger at American writers. Tbere isn't verymucb they could write about: neithertbey nor anyone else really knows any-tbing at al! about the human experi-ences tbat surround the production ofoil. A great deal bas been invested inensuring tbe muteness of the OilEncounter: on tbe American (or West-ern) side, tbrough regimes of strict cor-porate secrecy; on the Arab side, by tbepbysical and demographic separation ofoil installations and their workers fromthe indigenous population.

The Trenchby Abdeirahman Munif

translated by Peter Theroux(Pantheon, 554 pp., $25)

Cities of Saltby Abdeirahman Munif

iraiislated by Peter Theroux(Vintage, 627 pp., $12.95 paper)

It is no accident, tben, tbat tbe genreof "My Days in tbe Gulf has yet to beinvented. Most Western oilmen of thisgeneration bave no reason to be any-thing otber tban silent about their work-ing lives. Their experience of the Mid-dle East is culturally a nullity, lived outlargely witbin portable versions of West-ern suburbia.

In some ways tbe story is oddly similaron tbe Arab side, except tbat there it is aquirk of geography—of geology, to beexact—that is largely to blame for oil'sliterary barrenness. Perversely, oil cboseto be discovered in precisely those partsof the Middle East tbat have been themost marginal in tbe development ofmodern Arab culture and literature—onthe outermost peripheries of such liter-ary centers as Cairo and Beirut.

Until quite recently, the littoral of theGulf was considered an outlying regionwithin the Arab world, a kind of frontierwhose inhabitants' worth lay more intbeir virtuous simplicity tban in tbeircultural aspirations. The sligbt curl oftbe lip tbat inevitably accompanies anattitude of that kind has become, if any-thing, a good deal more pronouncednow tbat many Arab writers from Egyptand Lebanon—countries with falteringeconomies but rich literary traditions—

are constrained to earn their livelihoodin the Gulf. As a result, young Aiab writ-ers are no more likely to write aboutthe Oil Encounter than are their West-ern counterparts. No matter bow longthey have lived in the Gulf or in Libya,when it comes to the practice of fictiontbey generally prefer to return to tbefamiliar territories staked out by tbeir lit-erary forebears. There are, of course,some notable exceptions (such as thePalestinian writer Gliassan Kanafani'sremarkable story "Men in the Sun"), butotberwise the Gulf serves all too often asa metapbor for corruption and deca-dence; a surrogate for tbe expressicm ofthe resentment tbat so many in the Arabworld feel toward tbe regimes that ruletbe oil kingdoms.

I n fact, very few people any-wbere write about tbe OilEncounter. Tbe silence ex-tends much further tban the

Arabic- or English-speaking worlds. TakeBengali, a language deeply addicted tothe travelogue as a genre. Every yearseveral dozen accounts of travel inAmerica, Enrope, China, and so on arepiiblisbed in Bengali, along witb innu-merable short stories and novels aboutexpatriates in New Jersey, California,and various parts of Evirope. Yet thehundreds of tbousands of Bengali-speaking people wbo live and work inthe oil kingdoms scarcely ever merit lit-erary attention—or any kind of interest,for that matter.

As one of the few people wbo havetried to write about tbe fioating world ofoil, I can bear witness to its slipperiness,to tbe ways in wbich it tends to trip fic-tion into incoherence. In tbe end, per-haps, it is tbe craft of writing itself—orrather writing as we know it today—tbatis responsible for tbe muteness of theOil Encounter. The experiences that oilhas generated run counter to many ofthe historical imperatives tbat baveshaped writing over tbe last couple ofcenturies and given it its distinctiveforms.

The territory of oil is bafilingly multi-lingual, for example, wbile the novel,witb its conventions of naturalistic dia-logue, is most at home vvitbin monolin-gual speech communities (witbinnation-states, in other words). Equally,tbe novel is never more comfortablethan when it is luxuriating in a "sense ofplace," reveling in its unique power toevoke mood and atmosphere. But theexperiences associated with oil are livedout witbin a space that is no place at all,a world tbat is intrinsically displaced,heterogeneous, and international. It is aworld that poses a radical challenge notmerely to the practice of writing as weknow it, but to mucb of modern culture:

30 THENEWREPUBLIC MARCH 2,1992

to such notions as the idea of distin-guishable and distinct civilizations, orrecognizable and separate "societies." Itis a world whose closest analogues aremedieval, not modern—wbicb is proba-bly why it has proved so successful ineluding tbe gaze of contemporaryglobal culture. The truth is that we donot yet possess tbe form that can givetbe Oil Encounter a literary expression.

For tbis reason alone. Citiesof Salt, tbejordanian writerAbdeirahman Munif s mon-umental five-part cycle of

novels dealing with the history of oil,ought to be regarded as a work ofimmense significance. It so happens tbattbe first novel in tbe cycle is also inmany ways a wonderful work of fiction,perbaps even in parts a great one. PeterTberotix's excellent Engli.sh translationof this novel was published a few yearsago under the eponymous title Cities ofSalt, and now its successor, The Trench,bas appeared.

Munifs prose is extremely difficult totranslate, being rich in ambiguities andunfamiliar dialectical usages, and soTheroux deserves to be commended forhis translations—especially of tbe firstbook, where he bas done a wonderful

job. He is scrupulously faitbful to botbtbe letter and the spirit of the original,while sacrificing nothing in readability.Where Theroux bas intervened, it is inwbat would appear to be the relativelyunimportant matters of punctuationand typography. (He has numberedeach chapter, tbough tbe Arabic textdoes not really bave cbapters at all, butmerely extended breaks between pages;and be bas also eliminated Munifsfavorite device of punctuation, a sen-tence or paragrapb that ends with twoperiod points ratber tban one, to indi-cate indeterminacy, inconclusivity, wbatyou will . . .) These changes are slightenough, but they bave tbe overall effectof producing a text that is much more"naturalistic" tban tbe original. One daya professor of comparative literaturesomewbere will have fun using Ther-oux's translations to document thechanges in protocol tbat texts undergoin being sbaped to conform to differentculttiral expectations.

The Arabic title of Munifs first novelbas the connotation of "tbe wilderness"or "tbe deserl.," and it begins with whatis possibly tbe best and most detailedaccount of tbat mytbical event, a FirstEncounter, in fiction—al! the better forbeing, for once, glimpsed from thewiong end of the telescope. The novelopens, appropriately, on an oasis whosename identifies it as tbe source, or thebeginning: Wadi al-Uyoun, "an outpour-ing of green in the harsh, obdurate

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desert." To the caravans that occasion-ally pass through it, as to its inhabitants,the wadi is an "earthly paradise," and tonone more so than one Miteb al-Hathal("the Troublemaker"), an elder of atribe called al-Atoum:

Left lo himsflf to talk about Wadi al-Uyoun, Miteb al-Hathal would go on in away no one couki believe, for he could notconfine himself to the good air and thesweetness of Llie water ... or to tbe magnif-icent nights; be wotild tell stories which insome cases dated back to the days of Noah,or so said the old men.

B ut unsettling portents soonbegin to intrude upon thisearthly paradise. Oneevening at sunset, one of

Miteh's sons returns from watering thefamily's livestock and tells his father ofthe arrival of "three foreigners with twomarsh Arabs, and they speak Arahic"—"People say they came to look for water."But when Miteb goes to fmd out forhimself, he sees th em going to "placesno one dreamed of going," collecting"un thinkable things," and writing"things no one understood," and hecomes to the conclusion that "they cer-tainly didn't come for water—they wantsomething else. But what could they pos-sibly want? What is there in this drydesert besides dust, sand, and starva-tion?"

The people of the wadi hear the for-eigners asking questions "about dialects,about tribes and their disputes, aboutreligion and sects, about the rocks, thewinds and the rainy season"; they listento them quoting from the Koran andrepeating the Muslim profession offaith; and they begin to "wonder amongthemselves if these were jinn, becausepeople like these who knew all thosethings and spoke Arabic yet neverprayed were not Muslims and could notbe normal humans." Reading the por-tents, Miteb the Troublemaker sensesthat something terrible is about tobefall the wadi and its people, but heknows neither what it is nor how to pre-vent it. Then suddenly, to everyone'srelief, the foreigners leave, and the wadisettles back, just a trifle uneasily, to itsold ways.

But soon enough the strangers comeback. They are no longer just unspeci-fied "foreigners" but Americans, andthey are everywhere, digging, collecting,and handing out "coins of English andArab gold." Their liberality soon winsthem friends in the wadi, but even theclosest of their accomplices is utterlybewildered by their doings: "nothingwas stranger than their morningprayers: they began by kicking their legsand raising their arms in the air, movingtheir bodies to the left and right, and

then touching their toes until they werepanting and drenched with sweat."Then a number of "yellow iron hulks"arrive, adding to the bewilderment ofthe wadi's inhabitants: "Could a manapproach them withotit injury? Whatwere they for and how did theybehave—did they eat like animals ornot?" Fearing the worst, the people ofthe wadi go to their emir to protest, onlyto be told that the Americans have"come from the ends of the earth tohelp us"—because "'There are oceansof blessings under this soil.' "

The protests are quickly suppressed,Miteb and other troublemakers arethreatened with death, and before longthe wadi's orchards and dwellings aredemolished by the "yellow iron hulks."After the flattening of his beloved wadi,Miteb mounts his "white Omani she-camel" and vanishes into the hills,becoming a prophetic spectral figurewho emerges only occasionally from thedesert to cry doom and to strike terrorinto those who collaborate with the oil-men. As for Miteb's family and the restof the wadi's inhabitants, they arequickly carried away by passing camelcaravans. A number of them set out fora coastal settlement called Harran ("theOverheated"), where the new oil instal-lations are to be built, a "cluster of lowmud houses"—a place evidently verymuch as Doha and Kuwait were only afew decades ago.

The rest of Munifs narrativecenters upon the earlystages of Harran's transfor-mation: the construction

of the first roads, the gradual influx ofpeople, the building of the oil installa-tions, the port and the emir's palace.Working in shifts, the newly arrivedArab workers and their American over-seers slowly conjure two new townshipsinto being, Arab Harran and AmericanHarran. Every evening, after the day'swork is done, the men drift home

to the two sectors like streams coursingdown a slope, one broad and one small,the Americans to their camp and the Arabsto theirs, the Americans to their swimmingpool, where their racket could be heard intbe nearby barracks bebind tbe barbedwire. Wben silence fell the workers guessedthe Americans had gone into their air-conditioned rooms wbose diick curtainsshut everything out: sunlight, dust, flies,and Arabs.

Soon Harran no longer quite belongsto its people, and the single most impor-tant episode in the building of the newcity has little to do with them. It is thestory of an R-and-R ship that pays thecity a brief visit for the benefit of theAmericans living in the yet-unfinishedoilLown:

Tbe astonished people of Harranapproacbed [tbe ship] imperceptibly, stepby step, hke sleepwalkers. They could notbelieve their eye.s and ears. Had there everbeen anything like this ship, tbis huge andmagnificent? Where else in the world werethere women like these, who resembledboth milk and figs in tbeir tanned wbite-ness? Was it possible tbat men couldsbamelessly walk around witb women, witbno fear of otbers? Were these tbeir wives,or sweethearts, or something else?

For a whole day and night, the inhab-itants of Harran watch the Americansof the oiltown disporting themselveswith the newly arrived women, and bythe time the ship finally leaves "themen's balls are ready to burst." Thisevent eventually comes to mark thebeginning of the history of this city ofsalt:

This day gave Harran a birtb date, record-ing when and how it was built, for mostpeople have no memory of Harran beforetbat day. Even its own natives, wbo badlived tbere since tlie arrival of tbe firstfrightening group of Americans andwatched with terror the realignment of thetown's shoreline and hills—tiie Harranis,born and bred there, saddened by tliedestrtiction of their hotises. recalling theold sorrows of lost travelers and the dead—remembered the day the ship came bettertban any otber day, widi fear, awe, and sur-prise. It was practically die only date tbeyremembered.

T he most sustained wrongnote in Cities of Salt isreserved for its conclu-sion. The novel ends with

a dramatic confrontation between theold Harran and the new: between aworld where the emir sat in coffee-houses and gossiped with the Bedouin,where everybody had time for everyoneelse and no one was ever so ill thatthey needed remedies that were soldfor money, and a universe in which Mr.Middlcton of the oil company holdstheir livelihoods in his hands, wherethe newly arrived Lebanese doctorSubhi al-Mahmilji ("physician and sur-geon, specialist in internal and vene-real diseases. Universities of Berlin andVienna") charges huge fees for thesmallest service, where the emir spieson the townspeople with a telescopeand needs a cadre of secret police totell him what they are thinking. "Everyday it's gotten worse," says one long-time resident of Harran, pointingtoward the American enclave: "I toldyou, I told every one of you, the Amer-icans are the disease, they're the rootof lhe problem, and what's happenednow is nothing compared to what theyhave in store for us."

The matter comes to a head when aseries of events—a killing by tlie secret

32 THENEWREPUBLIC MARCH 2,1992

police, sightings of the troublemakingMiteb, the laying-off of tw^enty-threeworkers—prompts the workers of Har-ran to invent spontaneously the no-tion of the strike. They stop workingand march throttgh the town chanting:

... Tbe pipeline was built by beasts of prey.We wili safeguai d our rights.Tbe Americans do not own it.Tbis land is our land.

Then, led by two of Miteb the Troti-blemaker's sons, they storm the oilinstallation, sweeping aside ihe emir'ssecret police and the oil company'sgtiards, and rescue some of their fellowworkers who'd been trapped inside..\nd the book ends with an unequiv-ocal triumph for the workers: the half-crazed emir fiees ihe city after orderingthe oil company lo reinstate its sackedemployees.

I I is not hard to see why Mtmifwould sticcumb to lhe tempta-tion t(» end his book on anoptimistic note. His is a devas-

tatingly painful story: a slow, round-about recounting of lhe almost acciden-tal humiliation of one people byanother. There is very little bitterness inMtinif's telling of it. Its effectiveness liesrather in the gradual accumulation ofcTetail. Munifs American oilmen are nei-ther rapacious nor heartiess. On thecontrary, they are eager, businesslike,and ctirious. WTien inxdted to an Arabwedding, they ask "about everything,aboul words, clotiiing and food, aboutthe names of the bridegroom and hisbride and whetiier they had known eachother before, and iJ:' they had evermet.... Every small thing excited theAmericans' ainazemenl." It is notthrough direct confrontations that theHarranis meet their humiliation. Quitethe opposite. Theirs is the indignity ofnol being taken seriously at all: of beingregardecl as an obstacle on the scale of aminor technical snag in the process ofdrilling for oil.

Better than any other, Munif'smethod succeeds in showing tis why somany people in the Middle East aremoved to clutch al straws to regain somemeasure of selt-respect for themselves;why so many Saudis, for example, feltthe humiliation of Iraq's army almostas their own. But in fact the story iseven grimmer than Munifs version ofit. and the ending he chooses isfounded in ptire wish-fulfillnient. Itprobably has more to do with itsaitthor's own history than with the storyof oil in the (ittlf.

Abdeirahman Munif was born in1933, into a fatnily of Saudi Aiabian ori-gin settled in Jordan. (He was laterstripped of his Saudi citizenship for

political reasons.) He studied in Bagh-dad and Cairo, and went on lo earn aPh.D in oil economics at the University'of Belgrade—back in the days of Titoitesocialism, when books written by Pro-gressive writers always ended in working-class victories. Since then Munifs work-ing life has been spent mainly in the oilindustry in lhe Middle East, albeit in arather sequestered corner of it: he hasocctipied important positions in the Syr-ian Oil Company, and be has served aseditor in chief of an Iraqi journal calledOil and Development.

N o one, in odier words, is ina better position thanMunif to know that theHnal episode in bis slory is

nothing more than an escapist fantasy.He must certainly be aware that thework forces of the international oil com-panies in ttie Ai'abian peninsula havenever succeeded in becoming politicallyeffective. When they showed signs ofrestiveness in the 1950s, they were ruth-lessly and very effectively stippressed bytheir rulers, with the help of the oilcompanies. Over the last couple ofdecades, the powers-that-be in the oilsheikhdoiris (and who knows exactlywho they are) have followed a careftilstrategy for keeping their workers quies-cent: they have held the Arab compo*nent of their work forces at a stricdy reg-ulated numerical level, wbile importinglarge numbers of migrants from severalof the poorer countries of Asia.

The policy has proved magically effec-tive in lhe short run. It has created aclass of worket-s who, being separatedfrom the indigenous poptilation (andfrom each other) bv barriers of cultureand langtiage, are politically passive in away that a predominantly Arab workforce could never be within the Arab-speaking world—a class that is ali themore amenable to control for living per-petually under threat of deportation. Itis, in fact, a class of helots, with virtuallyno rights at all, and its members areoften subjected to tbe most hideouskinds of physical abuse. Their experi-ence makes a mockery of the httmanrights rhetoric that accompanied theGulf war; the fact that the war haseffected no changes in the tabor policiesof the oil sheikhdoms is proof in theeyes of millions of people in Asia andAfrica that the "new world order" isde.signed to defend the rights of certainpeople at the expense of others.

Thtis, the story of the real conse-quences of the sort of political restive-ness that Munif describes in Cities of Saltis not likely to warm the heart quite ascoziiy as the ending he gives bis novel.But if Munif can be accused of naiveteon this score, he must still be given

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MARCH 2,1992 THE NEW REPtlBLiC 33

credit for seeing that the workplace,where democracy is said to begin, is thesite where the foundations of contempo-rary authoritarianism in the oilsheikhdoms were laid.

Today it is a commonplace in theWestern media that aspirations towarddemocracy in the Arabian peninsula area part of the fallout of changes usheredin by oil and the consequent breakdownof "traditional" society. In fact, in severalinstances exactly the opposite is true: oiland the developments it has hrought inits wake have been directly responsiblefor the suppression of whatever demo-cratic aspirations and tendencies therewere within the region.

Certain parts of the Gulf such asBahrain, whose commercial importancefar predates the discovery of oil, havelong possessed sizable groups of busi-nessmen, professionals, and skilledworkers—a stratum not unlike a middleclass. On the whole, that class sharedthe ideology of the nationalist move-ments of various nearby countries suchas India, Egypt, and Iran. It was their lib-eral aspirations that became the first vic-tims of oil's most hizarre, most murder-ous creation: the petro-despot, dressedin a snowy dishdasha and armed withstate-of-the-art weaponry—the creaturewhose gestation and birth Munif sets outto chronicle in the second volume ofthe Cities of Salt cycle. The Trench.

U nfortunately The Trenchcomes as a great disap-pointment. The narrativenow moves away from Har-

ran to a city in the interior calledMooran ("the Changeable"), whichserves as the seat of the country's rulingdynasty. With the move to the capital,the focus of the narrative now shifts tothe country's rulers.

The story of The Trench is commonenough in the oil sheikhdoms of theArabian peninsula: it begins with theaccession to power of a sultan hy thename of Khazael and it ends with hisdeposition, when he is removed fromthe throne hy rival factions within theroyal family. Munif describes the trans-formations that occur during SultanKhazael's reign hy following the careerof one of his chief advisers, a Syrian doc-tor called Subhi al-Mahmilji (who ear-lier played an important part in the cre-ation of the new Harran). The story hasgreat potential, but Munifs voice doesnot prove equal to the demands of thenarrative. It loses the note of wonder, ofdetached and reverential curiosity, thatlent such magic to parts of Cities of Salt,while gaining neither the volume northe richness of coloring that its materialdemands.

Instead Munif shifts to satire, and the

change proves disastrous. He makes avaliant attempt—not for nothing are hisbooks hanned in various countries inthe Arabian peninsula—but sadre hasno hope of success when directedagainst figures like Sultan Khazael andhis family. No one, certainly no merewriter of fiction, could hope to satirizethe royal families of the Arabian penin-sula with a greater breadth of imagina-tion than they do themselves. As count-less newspaper reports can prove,factual accounts of their doings are wellable to beggar the fictional imagination.Indeed, in the eyes of the world atlarge, Arah and non-Arah, the oilsheikh scarcely exists except as a carica-ture; he is the late twentieth century'smost potent symhol of decadence,hypocrisy, and corruption. He pre-emptsthe very possibility of satire. Of course,it wasn't always so. The compulsionsand the absurdities of an earlier genera-tion of oil sheikhs had their roots in agenuinely tragic historical predicament.But those very real dilemmas arereduced to caricature in Munifs SultanKhazael.

Even where it is successful, moreover,Munifs satire is founded ultimatelyupon a kind of nostalgia, a romantichearkening back to a pristine, unspoiledpast. It is not merely Americans fromthe oil companies who are the intrudershere: every "foreigner" is to somedegree an interloper in Harran andMooran. As a result, Munif is led to

ignore those very elements of the his-tory of the oil kingdoms that ought toinspire his curiosity, the extraord^inaryadmixtures of cultures, peoples, and lan-guages that have resulted from the OilEncounter.

Workers from other parts of Asiahardly figure at all in Munifs story.Wlien they do it is either as stereotypes(a Pakistani doctor in Cities of Salt hearsthe name Muhammad Jiunah) or asfaceless crowds, a massed symbol ofchaos: "Once Harran had been a city offishermen and travelers coming home,but now it belonged to no one; its peo-ple were featureless, of all varieties andyet strangely unvaried. They were all ofhumanity and yet no one at all, anassemblage of languages, accents, colorsand religions." The irony of The Trench isthat in the end it leaves its writer a pris-oner of his intended victim. Once Munifmoves away from the earliest stages ofthe Oil Encounter, where each side'sroles and attributes and identities areclearly assigned, to a more complicatedreality—to the crowded, multilingual,culturally polyphonic present of the Ara-bian peninsula—he is unable to freehimself from the prison house of xeno-phobia, bigotry, and racism that wascreated hy precisely such figures ashis Sultan Khazael. In its failure. TheTrench provides still one more lessonin the difficuldes that die experience ofoil presents for the novelistic imag-inadon. •

The Gentleman as HeroBY P. N . FURBANK

Trollope: A Biographyby N. John Hall(Oxford University Press, 581 pp., $35)

C hameleonism in a literarybiographer, it could beargued, is a vice, andthose famous "sympathies"

between biographer and subject, ofwhom it is said admiringly that the proseof the one can hardly be distinguishedfrom the prose of the other, are a snare.It is bad tacdcs, and a fault of taste, to beepigrammatic in a li±e of Oscar Wilde ormellifluous in a life of Walter Pater.

The rule would certainly seem to applyin the case of Anthony Trollope, for rea-sons that reach deep into bis life and hischaracter. For he was a signal example ofa self-made, or "twice-born," man. The

central theme of his Autobiography is howa wretched and slovenly idler took aniron grip on himself and developed ahent for, and a delighted addiction to,thoroughness and regularity; how a mis-fit found his salvation in turning himselfinto a well-running machine.

There was a price to pay for this mech-anization, but it was not altogether theexpected one. It had no hardeningeffect on his heart and feeling. Heremained a truculent but tenderheartedman. But it caused him, a very intelli-gent person, to dismiss an enormousnumber of things as not to he talkedabout, or even thought ahout. On a few

34 THE NEW REPUBLIC MARCH 2,1992