A Far-Off Land...An Alien Tribe

The kind of effect that rapid technological advancement can have on a society has been fodder for many fantasies--from Big Brother's totalitarian regime to Woody Allen's scientist doctors cloning a man from his nose. But most authors and directors and sociologists and philosophers start from the premise that the society thus transformed was ready for progress to begin with. Dr. Seymour Gray, an American physician appointed to head a brand-new hospital in Saudi Arabia, had the opportunity to see how much more wrenching such advancement can be when a country moves from a primitive nomadic culture to a modern technological state in only a few decades.

In Beyond the Veil, Gray almost novelistically traces his adjustment to the challenges and idiosyncracies he found in Saudi Arabia. Built with proceeds from the sale of Saudi Arabian oil, the hospital is "one of the newest and best-equipped in the world." Most of its patients, however, especially the desert nomads, have never seen a doctor before and believe no medical care can help them if Allah wants them to die. Better-educated Saudis, including numerous princes and princesses, rarely get medical care at home, preferring the better-known hospitals abroad. Gray's vivid anecdotes tell of other incongruities of the country: royal patients who demand an entourage of 100 attendants in the hospital. Bedouins who try to cure themselves by branding, and their wives, who are willing to strip for a physical examination only if they may keep their long black veils over their faces.

When Gray's stint began, personal obstacles mirrored the professional ones; he moved into primitive quarters because of a housing shortage, and his wife had to face the adjustment to a country where women spend their lives covered from head to toe in several layers of black fabric. They were still getting their bearings when a prince, a special friend of the king's needed treatment for an ulcer. His high status and the awkward timing made the doctor's visit a test case for the entire hospital. Dr. Hugh Compton, the hospital's director of medical affairs, told him:

"We have to convince the King that this hospital will work. If the prince recovers, then it will put us in good stead..."

Then, to my surprise, he asked gently, "By the way, have you unpacked?"

"Not yet."

"Good. Don't. If the prince doesn't recover, you will be asked to leave the country. It is the custom here."

Gray is a doctor, not an author, and his writing occasionally wanders into verbosity. But the pace of his storytelling never lags. As a doctor, Gray had access to both the rich and the poor, seeing more facets of the Saudi culture than a diplomat might. The narrative skips around in time as the author tries, sometimes confusingly, to cram all of three years of experience into 300 pages; he shares dinner with a Bedouin tribe, attends a royal wedding, and spends a great deal of time in conversations with a wide range of Saudi patients and acquaintances, from poor farmers to members of the plush Arab-American Oil Company that first discovered Arabian oil.

The apparent candor of his speakers carries Gray's accounts of these interviews past Western preconceptions for a true "insider's view." In one of many long discussions with Sultana, a California-educated princess about to marry a Saudi businessman, Gray learns why women in Saudi Arabia accept wearing full-length veils and submitting to the wills of their husbands and fathers:

Any girl who goes around with her face uncovered will be stared at, and it's a terrible experience. You become very conscious of the stares, and you begin to feel dirty. It is easier to wear a veil and avoid these problems.

The author's occasional attempts to find symbolic meaning in his experiences generally fall flat; he has not written a novel. The experiences themselves, though, are vivid enough to provide a convincing picture of a life behind a different veil--the one that shrouds a desert country from Western eyes. Perhaps the reader is not ready to pack his bags and move to the Empty Quarter, but he will surely be glad that Gray did.