By Larry Condit

In his new book, “Florence of Arabia” (Random House, 2004), satirist Christopher Buckley (”Thank You for Smoking,” “No Way to Treat a First Lady”) takes on the Middle East, to the delight of readers.

When Nazrah al-Bawad, wife (well, the fourth, most junior, most beautiful and most independent wife) of Prince Bawad, the ambassador of the Royal Kingdom of Wasabia to the United States, leaves the embassy grounds intoxicated after a late-night argument, she is lost and confused. With Virginia State troopers in hot pursuit, she crashes her Mercedes into the gate at CIA headquarters.

Nazrah calls the only person she knows, Florence Farfaletti, an acquaintance from the State Department, and asks for political asylum.

Florence, “a deputy to the deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs,” does everything she can think of; but diplomatic immunity and other pressures prevail. Nazrah is on her way home in a Royal Wasabian military aircraft within hours.

Florence, who had been married to a Wasabian prince herself when just out of Yale University with her degree in Arabic studies, is not surprised to find, two days later, that Nazrah has been publicly executed.

Florence’s response to this news is to closet herself for three days, emerging with a report titled “Female Emancipation as a Means of Achieving Long-Term Political Stability in the Near East: An Operational Proposal.”

This report is so well received that she finds her transfer request - which she never made - to the visa desk at the U.S. consulate in the Cape Verde Islands approved, effective immediately.

Florence departs, but not to the Cape Verde Islands. She goes for a motorcycle ride to consider her employment options.

When she is pulled over, not by police but by an unmarked government car, she is surprised to meet someone calling himself “Uncle Sam.”

He says that her proposal has merit and offers to fund putting it into operation, but he doesn’t identify himself or the agency with which he is connected.

Florence eventually accepts his proposal to select her own team and sets about to establish a feminist television station in the Emirate of Matar, a coastal country 10 miles wide and hundreds of miles long, whose borders were drawn primarily to deprive its much larger neighbor, the Royal Kingdom of Wasabia, of a seaport.

The House of Saud, of course, is thinly disguised as the rulers of Wasabia, and the puns never let up as Buckley pokes fun at both the U.S. government and the Middle East.

Larry Condit is a reference librarian at the Los Altos main library.