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Life of a Diplomat in a Middle Eastern War-Torn Country
Doubleday
May 2006
384 pages
ISBN: 0385515561
Hardcover
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Literature and Fiction | Fiction
David Richards is a mid-level diplomat assigned to the
sleepy Middle Eastern kingdom of Kutar. Richards spends
his days monitoring small development projects and his
nights attending embassy cocktail parties and bedding
various visiting American women and diplomats’ wives. The time is the early 1980s, when the American Empire has
begun to tentatively flex its muscles once again. Kutar is
a diplomatic backwater, a former British colony, barely a
blip on the State Department’s radar back in Washington.
For centuries desultory tribal conflict has flared
sporadically in the arid hills hundreds of miles from the
coastal capital of Laradan, and as the book opens rumors
of a new skirmish there reach the city’s inhabitants. As
always, the residents of Laradan ignore the stories, but
this time something is different: The Americans decide to
do something about it. As any casual student of geopolitics might guess, this is
bad news for the people of Kutar. Urged on by a Kurtzian
American military advisor named Colonel Munn, the little-
used Kutaran army marches into the hills. In quick order
they are decimated, and with stunning rapidity the heights
above Laradan are occupied by a rebel force possessed of
the government’s abandoned artillery. Soon the Americans,
and all other foreigners, are ordered from the country and
leave the people of Laradan to their fate. For his own deeply personal reasons, David chooses to stay
on in the besieged city, and moves into the Moonlight
Hotel, a crumbling colonial dinosaur. There he is joined
by an eclectic assortment of other foreigners, including a
senior British diplomat, an acid-tongued Romanian
countess, and Amira, an aristocratic young woman who
previously spurned David’s romantic advances. Together,
this small community tries to maneuver over the radically-
changed landscape of the beleaguered city, while holding
out hope that the outside world might yet come to its
rescue. Then the shooting begins in earnest.
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