A Hologram for the King

The Book

There was something very familiar about the whole scenario of Dave Eggers' easy to read novel but I couldn't place it.

An IT businessman, Alan, and his team are in Saudi Arabia to bid for a contract to supply a vanity project by the King. A folly city is being built in the desert but so far it is falling short of expectation due to lack of funding. They arrive to give a presentation but are put in a tent with no wi-fi, no food and every day discover that the King is unable to meet them or are fobbed off with excuses.

During the interminable wait, Alan thinks about his ex-wife, his grown-up daughter and his neighbour who killed himself. He has a cyst at the top of his spine, which he worries is cancerous.

He is introduced to wild drug and hooch-fuelled parties through contact with Danish civil servant Hanne, discovers some contradictions of life in Saudi Arabia through local taxi driver Yousef and develops a romantic attachment to doctor and surgeon Zahra



Through Alan, Eggers explores the burst bubble of USA prosperity, where so much manufacturing and awarded contracts have migrated to China and South East Asia with their cheaper labour costs. Alan is a metaphor for America - deflated; lacking in self-confidence, doubting his abilities and after eight years of celibacy, impotent.

Official movie site


The Film

The film is essentially a fish out of water comedy, whereby two cultures collide and its gradually revealed that both are quite similar deep down - both cultures have the same essential human problems with marriage, fidelity, and children.
It's deftly handled and apart from a mention by Yousef of a temple where the executions take place, it avoids any contention or international upset.

This is very interesting when you compare the book to the film, because the book has a couple of incidents where the analogy is a thinly veiled dig at US foreign policy; Alan tries to come between two fighting workers over a mobile phone that one of his staff has thrown away and his interference is seen by both sides as unwanted and he is chased. There is also a great set piece where a trigger-happy Alan, full of bravado,  is driven out in the night to hunt for wolves that are ravaging the local sheep and almost kills the shepherd.
Both of these have been lost in the film, where Alan takes no action in either situation...

What the film does add, unintentionally I suspect, if you keep Alan as the metaphor for the USA, is that he becomes Saudi Arabia's bitch in effect, selling condo apartments for the regime.

There are enough unexpected touches, however - Tom Hanks lip-syncing to Talking Heads' Once in a Lifetime dream sequence at the very beginning and drunken hallucinations - to make it less run of the mill.

If you enjoyed the book, try Salmon Fishing in the Yemen by Paul Torday (also a film)

If you enjoyed the film, try Local Hero