Tag Archives: Yanbu

Visit the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia via Roman à Clef

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Snuggle up for the most informative, least intrusive and safest international travel adventure ever—A roman à clef in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Roman à clef?

A roman à clef (French for “novel with a key”) is a book that tells a real-life story or depicts real people using fictional names, places, and altered events. The “key” is the real-world connection. In my series The Landscape Architect, the key is the geography, the landscape which dominates the story. In addition to the landscape key, I used creative freedom to layer-in Thurberesque character interaction.

Why? …a long story; but here’s the short form.

When I was only an impressionable 17, my father moved us from the US to Belgium. While he was working there, he took us all to London West End on a weekend break. Before he and my mom went to a play, they dropped me off at the Metropole Cinema to watch David Lean’s unforgettable Lawrence of Arabia… and its blazing red Arabian dawn mystical power has ever since driven my life.  That was the beginning of how landscape became the key for all my romans à clef in The Landscape Architect series.

What follows is in the news now—a story about Yenbo Saudi Arabia. Yenbo, Yanbu—don’t trouble yourself with spellings. Transliteration between Arabic and Roman alphabets is always a moving target. The third book in my series, The Landscape Architect, is titled Yenbo Palms. Read it and learn some inside stuff about the Western Region of Saudi Arabia, the Yenbo of Lawrence of Arabia, the Yenbo of Christopher Janus (CJ), the Yenbo of the trans-Arabia oil pipeline in this weekend’s news.

Yenbo Palms QR link to Amazon.

Hejaz, Tihama

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Not every desert in the Arabian Peninsula is sand.

Hejaz, Tihama

The house, the human shelter in this photo sits where the Hejaz mountains fold down onto the flat Tihama coastal plain. The house’s position in the landscape tells the story of: water–there is life; and no water–no life.

In the mid 1980s I lived on the Red Sea coast of Saudi Arabia,  in the Western Region. The area is known historically as the Hejaz after the mountains running north from Jeddah, parallel to the Red Sea coast. This is the region of Mecca and Medina. And the Hejaz mountains divide the Tihama, the coastal plain influenced by the Red Sea from the inland deserts, Nafud, and Nejd.

The first time I heard the phrase in the above image caption, ‘no water–no life’ was in Morocco in the early 1970s. I was sitting with a group of people including a young Moroccan man, from Meknes, whose family originally had been farmers in Taza. He said, “Without water there is no life and no cleanliness.”