BLOOD AND OIL: Memoirs of a Persian Prince.<i> By Manucher Farmanfarmaian and Roxanne Farmanfarmaian</i> .<i> Random House: 514 pp., $35</i>

Manucher Farmanfarmaian was born in Tehran in 1917, one of 36 children, with eight wives, of a prince in the then dying dynasty of the Qajars, a Turkic family who had ruled Iran since the late 18th century. The family name is derived from one of father’s titles, Farman Farma, commander of commanders. The Farmanfarmaians owned estates in western Iran, near the tomb of the biblical Queen Esther, revered by Muslims and Jews alike, and were part of the displaced but still influential aristocracy that served the Pahlavi shahs until 1979. His life, vividly told in “Blood and Oil,” spans that of modern Iran--from the collapse of the Qajar dynasty through the Iranian Revolution and the arrival of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Told with energy, perception and great charm, this is a fine portrait of a country that has been effaced by the simplistic autocratic modernization of the Pahlavis and the demagogy of the mullahs. The outside world, be it the Arab states or the West, has in recent years found it easy to stereotype and dislike this country. Yet for anyone who wants to abandon the simplicities and the one-dimensional characterizations and gain insight into the great cultural and political richness of Iran, past, present and future, this book is a marvelous introduction.

Farmanfarmaian offers an insider’s perspective on the turmoil that has embroiled Iran in the last 70 years. He begins his story at the end--with a harrowing escape from post-revolutionary Tehran, across the mountains, in the company of smugglers who might have, at any time, killed him. His destination is Caracas, Venezuela, where, in the late 1950s, he had served as that country’s first Iranian ambassador and had established the contacts that led to the founding of OPEC in 1960. Today, he manages a potato chip factory in Caracas; “Blood and Oil” was co-written by his daughter, a journalist who is West Coast editor of Publishers Weekly.

Oil, as the title suggests, acts as one of the leitmotifs of this story. Trained as a petroleum engineer at Manchester University in England, Farmanfarmaian served as a ministry official, administrator and advisor to ministers during the early 1950s when Iran nationalized its oil industry and during the reign of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. Although personal rivalries kept Farmanfarmaian from the inner circle of the shah’s court, he nevertheless met many people who helped shape the fate of modern Iran. When describing Mohammed Mosadeq, a cousin who worked to nationalize the oil industry, Farmanfarmaian is measured; he admires Mosadeq’s honesty and patriotism but faults him for miscalculating how much the world needed Iranian oil. Mosadeq mishandled the negotiations with the United States and ultimately lost.

Farmanfarmaian’s portrait of the shah, Mosadeq’s opponent, is equally perceptive and measured. Although the shah opposed Mosadeq’s work with the oil industry, he nevertheless attempted to modernize the country and was devoted to making Iran strong. But Farmanfarmaian is appalled by the arrogance, conceit and shortsightedness of his industrial projects and tries, though not very convincingly, to contrast the distance between the shah and his people with the closer relationship between the Qajars and the Iranian people.

This gap became most evident in 1978 as the rumblings that led to the revolution began. Farmanfarmaian describes his last meeting with the shah, when, in the company of other members of the old nobility, he went to see him at the Sadabad Palace in Tehran. Farmanfarmaian was surprised to see the shah committing the same errors as his father, who by the time he abdicated in 1941, had lost support among the aristocracy. The same story repeated itself in 1978. At the palace, the shah looked “shrunken and tired”; he spoke quietly. With demonstrations taking place every day in cities all across Iran, he wanted the old nobility to go back to their villages and rally the people there. But his request was impossible to meet. Because of the land reform and industrialization that the shah favored, the aristocracy had lost its authority in the villages. Realizing that he had weakened them with his own hand, the shah shook his head and looked away.

Farmanfarmaian tells his story in a series of vignettes, a style reminiscent of the memoirs of the shah’s court minister, Assadollah Alam, who in 1991 published “The Shah and I: The Confidential Diary of Iran’s Royal Court.” Similarly in “Blood and Oil,” ambitious politicians, comic members of the family, devious American and British officials, relatives who are senior members of the Iranian Communist Party and a succession of beautiful and charming women parade across the pages. While “Blood and Oil” provides an important perspective of Iranian history, Farmanfarmaian also personalizes the account with stories from his own life. He movingly tells of a pilgrimage to Mecca, a fleeting love affair with an Englishwoman in Geneva and dinner with an “insipid” Richard Nixon and provides a graphic account of the celebrations of the 2,500 years of Persian monarchy, when the distinguished guests from around the world froze on their seats in the night air of the desert outside Shiraz.

The story, however, is haunted by the unanswerable but unavoidable question of whether things could have been different, whether Iran, a country of great natural and human wealth, which had never been formally colonized and which possessed not a few politicians of ability and insight, could have avoided the excesses of monarch and mullah alike. The easiest answer assumes that Iran, in the end, was destined to return to the Islamic character that Khomeini gave it. But Farmanfarmaian makes clear that the solutions that Khomeini offered Iran were just as artificial as the shah’s. Perhaps the problems in Iran should be blamed on foreigners, and Farmanfarmaian, who speaks as a patriot, condemns the interference of foreign officials, British and American, over the years.

In Iranian history, oil has played an undeniable role, and if the oil companies operating in the Middle East had adopted a similar arrangement as they did with Venezuela, Farmanfarmaian believes relations would have been better. Above all, the coup of 1953, which was backed by the West and replaced Mosadeq with the shah, laid the basis for the later explosion that cost the world, and Iran in particular, so much. The flattery that foreign officials later applied to the shah only made things worse. The picture that emerges is of a country more wronged than involved in wrong-doing. Yet this explanation is still not completely adequate. The mistakes and disastrous choices of Iranian leaders were also those of their own and of the political elite in Iran who lurched from one false answer to the other, only to end with the Islamic Republic.

Throughout a life spent in fine restaurants and imperial anterooms, as well as in danger and despair, Farmanfarmaian sustains his good humor and balance, drawing on that very particular form of optimism and generosity that Persians of earlier generations imbibed from their culture. This culture was Islamic, as the customs of their life showed, but it was an Islam laced with the pleasure of medieval Persian poetry and the ease with life that this poetry enjoined. “Blood and Oil” is peppered with quotes from Hafez, the poet whose philosophy most captured this mood, as well as with the elaborate but direct aphorisms with which Persians dot their speech. “Destiny,” wrote Hafez, “bestows to the ignorant the reins of government. You are learned and erudite--and this is your sin.”

Inevitably, perhaps, with this philosophy comes some of the less savory characteristics of the social world that once graced north Tehran--a love of intrigue, a contempt for Arabs, a tendency to blame outside influences (especially the BBC) for discontent within Iran itself. The journey from the court of the Qajars to a potato chip factory in Venezuela was a long and unexpected one, and Farmanfarmaian, like many educated Iranians, aristocratic or not, has seen the world he knew shattered. Yet beyond the insights into oil or the course of modern Persian history, it is the human warmth that is the most memorable feature of this book, which ends with the author enjoining the reader to have a sip of cognac. Such stoical graciousness, a quality that admits to the vicissitudes of life without giving in to despair, is deeply rooted in the history and culture of Iran: It will long outlast the bigotries of the Islamic Republic and of its enemies abroad.