Our Men in the Middle East : EXPATS Travels in Arabia, From Tripoli to Teheran <i> by Christopher Dickey (Atlantic Monthly Press: $18.95; 229 pp.) </i>

In 1985, Christopher Dickey, formerly the Central American bureau chief of the Washington Post, published “With the Contras,” an extraordinary book that remains far and away the best evocation of that sordid adventure that came to be known, in polite circles, as the Contra war, and whose bizarre and unexpected conclusion we have recently been privileged to witness. Joan Didion, who rarely gives quotes, rightly described the book at the time of publication as the one “that must be read to understand the morning’s headlines.” And though events have, obviously, rendered moot the political conclusions of Dickey’s book, his evocations of both Nicaragua and of the gamier corners of Washington and Langley seem as fresh today as they were when they were first written. Indeed, for all its merits as reporting, “With the Contras” will still be read and admired in years to come because it is a brilliantly dystopic work of travel writing. So it comes as no surprise that Dickey, who has since moved on to Newsweek and postings first in Cairo and now in Paris, has produced “Expats,” which is without question one of the best travel books of this or any other year.

The toughness and almost morbid acuity that Dickey brought to Central America is, if anything, more central to this new collection. Some of the pieces appeared first in magazines, but collected they seem to have a unity and a depth that make even the most familiar of them, like Dickey’s celebrated profile on the Egyptian novelist and Nobel laureate, Naguib Mahfouz, more interesting in book form. So much nonsense is written about the Arab world that readers can be forgiven for looking suspiciously at any book about the region, particularly one by an American. But whether he is thinking about the place of the writer in Mubarak’s Egypt, chatting with a British mine-disposal expert in Dubai, or evoking the streets of Teheran in the days immediately following the shooting down of Iran Air flight 659 by the U.S.S. Vincennes, Dickey’s writing remains admirably free of cliche and cant.

Interestingly, “Expats” is almost entirely free of theorizing about the Middle East. This alone would set Dickey’s book head and shoulders above its competitors, but, whether he adapted this strategy intentionally or whether the logic of his prose simply dictated this choice, the result is that Dickey’s portrait of the region is far more persuasive than that presented by more polemical writers. If he damns Libya in the opening piece, “Green Minds,” he never gives the reader the sense that he does so for jingoistic or racist reasons. Arabs, so demonized in the American imagination, come across in Dickey’s account, even at their worst, as people, alternatively odious and sympathetic just as people are odious and sympathetic the world over. In Dickey’s stories, there are few villains or heroes. Rather, most people, whether they are Americans still working in Tripoli despite their government’s directives, or Mahfouz, all but blind, obstinately refusing to stop going to his favorite Cairo cafe despite the growing volume of threats on his life, or the Iranian crowd demonstrating outside the former U.S. embassy in Teheran but showing unfailing courtesy to visiting American journalists, are just stuck, and trying to get by as best they can. In this age of piety and iron, Dickey’s creed of sympathy is particularly admirable.

In Teheran, listening to people shout “Death to America” on cue, but treating him with pained solicitude, Dickey reflects: “Think how an American crowd would have reacted if an Iranian reporter had been walking around in its midst after 290 American civilians, more than 60 of them children, had been blown out of the air by an American warship?” For a man who understands warriors, spooks, and gunmen as well as Dickey does, he is remarkably free of both the romanticism and simplicity of those sorts of characters. And lest it be thought that Dickey is some sort of bleeding-heart type, ever ready to understand everyone’s point of view except those of his own compatriots, listen to his summing-up of the lives of the American oilmen in their foreigners’ compound outside of Tripoli. “From what I hear,” he writes, “there are still some Americans mowing their lawns . . . still working for Kadafi, counting the days until their next vacation, counting their money and probably wishing to hell they’d never heard of the oil business.”

The individuals most fully developed in the book are, of course, the “expats” of its title. During his years in the Middle East, Dickey seems to have gotten to know well half the seconded British officers, nostalgic octogenarian explorers, international relief workers, and American businessmen from the Trucial States to Cairo. Radical critics will doubtless complain that these people are less important than the residents of these countries themselves. And it is true that in some of the pieces, particularly the portrait of the writer and adventurer Wilfred Thesiger and the account of British salvage captains in the Persian Gulf, the Arab world is more backdrop than subject. But Dickey never claims to be anything but an outsider, a traveler, and his book would have lost much of its authority had he concentrated on a different cast of characters.

In any case, one reads the best travel books for their author’s peculiarities and obsessions rather than strictly for the information they can import or the political point of view they can support. That, of course, is what makes them part of literature, and what ensures they will last. But even as politics, Dickey’s belief that the most important thing to do is understand other points of view and believe in other people’s humanity, is hardly the worst place to begin.