Customer Reviews

Private Dancer

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4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(3)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

When I was young and single, I fantasized about visiting Bangkok's fleshpot buffet. But, even 11 years in the Navy didn't provide the opportunity as I never made it away from Stateside. Now that I'm older, married, and only marginally wiser, I doubt that my wife would let me go - even if I could imagine conjuring up the energy to carouse once I got there. And there is, of course, the sobering specter of AIDS. But, should any of you young studs embark on the tour, PRIVATE DANCER should be required reading before reaching the airport departure gate.

Pete is a freelance writer hired by a publishing house to edit a new cookery book/travel guide for Thailand. Once ensconced in Bangkok, Pete is introduced to the red-light district by friend Nigel, where Pete meets pole dancer/prostitute Joy in the Zombie Bar. Pete is smitten despite advice from the resident expats that it's best not to get emotionally involved with a bar babe. And despite all the evidence, some provided by a private detective, that Joy is simply using Pete as a cash ATM, that she's married to a Thai man, and that she has sex with other farang (foreign) customers when he's out of town, Pete remains enamored of his PRIVATE DANCER. He desperately wants to believe her excuses, lies, and proclamations of true love - "I love you and have you in my heart only one. Miss you all the time."

Author Stephen Leather takes an interesting approach to the story, telling it alternately from the viewpoints of Pete, Joy, Pete's farang friends and acquaintances (Nigel, Big Ron, Bruce, Jimmy), the private detective Phiraphan, Pete's employer Alistair, and a certain Professor Bruno Mayer, an expert on prostitution in Thailand and cross-cultural relationships between the sex workers and their customers. What results is a fascinating and informative parable on the perils of falling for a Bangkok hooker that's probably just as valid no matter what the city, country, or nationality of the working girl. Indeed, as Stephen describes the milieu of Pete's tragic experience, the reader perhaps understands that it's more of a culture clash than anything else. From Joy's perspective, her life and means of getting money for herself and her family back in their village are nothing unusual or immoral. For her, emotional love for, and the provision of money by, a man are two sides of the same coin. The problem for westerner Pete, a Brit, is that he necessarily separates the two. In the end, the open-minded reader can rightly attach no blame to either, but only marvel at Pete's foolishness in the face of good advice from his Anglo and Australian friends that are old Bangkok hands.

PRIVATE DANCER seemed, at times, a bit too long for the message. In an email correspondence with Leather, I asked if the tale was based on the experience of anyone he knew. With utter candor, the author implied that at least some of the story derived from his own youthful follies. Perhaps Stephen was driven to over-emphasize the lesson - "Don't let this happen to you!" In any case, the book is an engaging addition to the backpack as you set out to sample the neon-bathed, x-rated delights of Patpong, Nana Plaza, and Soi Cowboy.

Posted by Admin / 31. January 2008, 03:37
UP UNTIL a couple of weeks ago, I must have been the only foreigner in Thailand who had not read Stephen Leather's novel Private Dancer. I knew about the book; I'd heard great things about the book; but I'm not what you would call a prolific reader, having read perhaps only twenty books during my lifetime. A friend loaned me his copy of Private Dancer and, thanks to two visits to Bangkok in three days, I found the four road trips of two hours each provided the perfect opportunity to finally read it.

I've never done a book review since I finished high school and I don't intend to start now, but I must report on what I discovered was a fabulous book. First of all, Private Dancer is a novel with the usual disclaimer that "All characters in this publication are fictitious ..." I don't believe that for a second; the reason being that I have personally met them all. They may not have been the exact characters Mr. Leather was referring to but they were their cosmic clones. Trust me, these people do exist. In fact, I was once one of them but I'm not going to disclose which one!
In this I found the only negative feature of the book: I suspect it would be far more enjoyable if the reader had prior knowledge of Thailand and, in particular, the foreign bar scene. To someone who has never been to Thailand, a lot of the events, the irony and the dialogue may be wasted. Nevertheless, I could relate to all of it and form a clear picture of every scene in my head, making it chilling reading.
This was another indication that although the novel may be a fictional story in its entirety, it must be based on a series of real events. Nobody could describe episodes so accurately and believably without having either experienced them himself or observed them first hand. Putting it crudely; you can't make this stuff up! For example, there is a scene in which the enraged hero tries to smash a television set. He throws it to the floor repeatedly and kicks it but still the screen doesn't break. Having never attempted this silliness myself and with a negligible knowledge of electronics, I would have thought a television set was a sensitive piece of equipment and the screen would be delicate. Our hero eventually gives up with the words, "God knows what they make the screens from, but take it from me, they're practically indestructible." In my opinion you would not know that unless you had actually tried it yourself or witnessed someone else in the act.
I confess that when I was a quarter way through the book, I had to stop reading. It was making me angry and frustrated. How could any man be so blind and stupid? I found myself shouting at the main character and fighting the urge to rip him from the pages, grab him by the throat and slap some sense into him - one slap for each syllable of my lecture. This was the beauty of Mr. Leather's prose; he made me feel like I was part of the action and, irrationally, that I could actually do something about it.
Thankfully, once my blood pressure went down I picked the book up again and continued reading. I thought the best line was after the hero broke into his girlfriend's apartment to find her alone with a young Thai man. When he'd calmed down some time later, she explained, "Pete, he not my boyfriend. He my drug dealer." Wow! Isn't that a position in which every man in love would like finding himself? Does he accept she is screwing around or does he accept she is a junkie? Talk about having to choose the lesser of two evils!
But the novel is predominantly about the Bangkok bar scene and the inherent deceit and deception - from both sides. There are no chapters to break up the flow and I liked the way every pivotal event is related from the viewpoint of each of the participants. Basically, you get to hear both sides of the story and can make up your own mind which one you believe.
There are also some poignant comments about, and criticisms of, foreign men who flirt with the bar scene. Some commentary is supposedly extracted from an essay `Cross-Cultural Complications of Prostitution in Thailand' by a real or fictitious Prof. Bruno Mayer. A scathing attack comes from one of the characters, a Thai private investigator. I felt the overwhelming desire to disagree with much of what he said but for the life of me I couldn't think up a valid argument to use. Citing one or two exceptions does not invalidate a rule unless the rule or argument uses specific terms like `all', `none', `every' or `never'.
The only statement I could dispute was, "But one thing is for sure - the relationship [between sex tourists and bargirls] won't last. Guaranteed." First you need to define the term `last'. A high percentage of marriages in the West between non-sex tourists and non-bargirls end in divorce. Some last a week; some last for many years. Does a happy 10-year marriage suddenly gone sour constitute a relationship failure? If so, and the only benchmark of success is `till death us do part', then there are a lot of unsuccessful relationships throughout the world, not just those originating in Thailand.
Being branded a `long term sex tourist' didn't thrill me either, having never thought of myself in those terms. But then I asked myself the definitive question: if they closed down all the bars and sent the girls packing back to their families, would I still want to live here? The answer, unfortunately, was `no'. Mr. Leather was correct once again.
Private Dancer contains hard and valuable lessons for us all and, as the cover says, "Should be compulsory reading for all first-timers to Thailand." I agree, with the rider that, once they've read it the first time without fully understanding it, they should wait a few weeks or months then read it again. All will become clear.
From Pattaya Today

Imagine, picking up a novel where you were so absolutely riveted, so drawn into the characters that you could actully feel the drippy heat of a Bangkok night and the racing of your heart as a drop dead, brown-skinned Thai women in a go-go bar lets loose a smile that just locks up your heart ..... . Well, that's what happened to me. I couldn't put this thriller down. My 20 hour flight from Bangkok home to NYC seemed like a mere extension of my visit as I was just sucked right back into that vortex of illusion hidden between the pages of Stephen Leather's Private Dancer. If one has any questions to what was going on in the Bangkok bar scene, how middled aged white males go over there and fall completely, head-over-heels in love with these brown skinned asian beauties ... or .... why men get hooked and live their 9 to 5's 11 months a year to fly clear across the world to this Asian Hotspot, this book answers it and more .... But it also destroys the illusions. It reveals the truth. The pathetic side. To impoverished Thai women, men are merely walking ATM cash dispensers. To the men, these are instant girlfriends, phenomenal actresses, whom within minutes, can elicit feelings of love no western woman could complete with, all enveloped in a package of innocence ... of youthfulness, the male fantasy we were promised by Hollywood. If you're planning a trip to Bangkok and you're male and are tempted in any way to investigate the sex scene or just wondering about those beautiful smiling Thai women beckoning you on, with a knowing glint in their eyes , please read this book. It will have you walking in with your eyes solidly open and even now, as I think about this book, I hope Mr. Leather writes a sequel, because, sitting now at 6 AM in the morning back in my NYC apartment this chilly February morning, his work has put me right back there in the heat of a Bangkok night. - John Petrocelli - trancecoach.com

I must first say that I thought this book serves as a good educational warning to tourists wanting to visit Thailand's bars and nightlife. It definitely pays to have some forewarning about the kind of stupid and sad things that naive western tourists have had happen to them. Like buying a house in Thailand for their new Thai wife and finding it is now owned by her family and being told to shove off home in the middle of the wedding party. Or the secret first husband or boyfriend the girlfriends often keep, even once the Thai girls become 'married' to their western partners. Or the plastic surgeons who cut out the Adam's apple, the [...], enhance the breasts, and whatever else so that sometimes even locals can't tell the 'sweet looking Thai girl' who was born a man, let alone first-time sex tourists. Or those strangely naive guys who always seem to exist (think of the Nigerian letter scam-still going strong after all these years) and think that if a pretty, pouting girl (usually with long hair, a tight bum in hot pants and midrift shirt) tells them they love them, and 'them only one', then that somehow means they can trust them with just about everything-their savings, emotions, career-you name it, which is in fact the main story in the book.

But in addition to these good anecdotal warnings, I thought the main story- revolving around a naive guy blindly trusting a typcial bar girl who said she always loved him and always will-'him only one' etc etc was a bit overcooked, or to put it better, 'enhanced'. I have no doubt that this story and others in the book are partly/mostly based on real life cases, but it is also obvious that these have been cherry picked to enhance and skew the book towards the consistently negative, with an undeniable air of superficiality similar to a plastic surgeon's [...] job. To repeat, it is deliberately skewed towards the most stupid and most extremely negative possible oucomes. You can feel this throughout the whole book.

Irony is good, but irony must be balanced, when extreme irony becomes a goal for a writer in itself, it is easy for superficiality and unrealistic embellishment to set in. In other words, it was as if the writer set himself a challenge to write a coherant rational story while at the same time leads to the most ridiculous outcomes imaginable regarding the clash of dating/sex cultures between prostitute East and male tourist West.

I'll give an example. Towards the end of the book the most gullible and naive single, US middle-aged male imaginable flys over to Thailand to propose in a longwinded love monologue to one of the more successful, better-looking, hardest, and coldest hookers going around the go-go clubs, (who can't even understand most of what he is saying in English and just wants to go with him to a short time motel to get it over with), after he saw her long legs, long hair, pouting smile and tight bum for about 10 seconds on a promotional tourist video. The girl, who already has a Thai husband, several rich western sponsors who don't know that either the husband or each other exists, marries him in Thailand and decides to go over with him to start a new life in the USA, eventually having several children (one not from the US father I might add). At the same time, the main charcter in the book, Pete, who has just spent years painfully learning the hard rules about Thailand's bar-girl scene has recently discovered his long term partner/hooker -Joy-already has a Thai husband on the side who he has been unknowlingly supporting, and losers her, and his dream (I won't tell you how). So Pete, who was also, initially, incredibly naive, but who has now mostly learnt the rules the hard way, loses out his hard-worked for dream whilst a common idiot gets his and then some. Cruel irony yes, but realistic, or the normal sway of things, no.

The writer might not like me saying this, but it is as if he has put all the negative cases in bed together. The book, as I said, is simply skewed. That is my only real, major complaint. Not every story in Thailand is like those described in this book, with only the 'better' stories serving as a ironic negative.

I thought 'Confessions of a Bangkok Private Eye' better in this genre, also based on many true cases in Thailand's bar scene, but it has more realism and less embellishment, not quite as consistently negative, but I must say is also a little skewed (he doesn't describe any/very few cases he simply stuffed up, for example), but I thought it was less extreme and more realistic.

Please note that this review comes with the Kindle edition, so some of the parts about formatting and such could be because of that.

I don't remember why this book caught my eye, but I make it a habit every week or two to go find some inexpensive books I can get on the Kindle. I check different things, click around on suggestions and at some point get some really out-there picks. This was one of them.

After reading the description and some of the reviews, I thought it sounded interesting. Though I don't plan on visiting Thailand, it's quite interesting to be able to look into another culture -- or sub-culture -- and what it can do to people. The book was quite an interesting read, though at times could get a bit confusing with the voices of so many different characters. I think the way of writing it could work, but there are times when small characters returned and I really had to strain to remember who the heck that character was and why he/she was important to the book.

The plot line was good. It kept me interested and I liked the idea of someone becoming infatuated with someone that they really couldn't ever "be with." The development of the main characters was good, though -- again -- some of the sub-characters were just in there.

The build-up was good and though I could see the direction the book was going to end, I thought it was a bit anti-climactic and seemed a little rushed.

As for the formatting I spoke about at first, some things seemed to be in wrong spots, punctuation was sometimes in the middle of a spot it shouldn't be in and there were slight grammar issues at times. But I've learned that sometimes the Kindle books can have some issues with that, so I don't always worry.

In the end, it was very much worth the $2.99 I paid for the book and it was a good read into another culture and lifestyle.

i have not read such an eye-opening book in some time, and it is an absolute steal at the amazingly-low price of around $2.00!! This is a very well-written narrative and like the above-mentioned Laclos novel, told in epistolary style. It is painstaking in it's depiction of the various relationships that develop between some of the western-bred men who visit and live in Thailand, and the young women who dance in the clubs. I could not turn my Kindle off once I started reading the fascinating and tragic story of Pete and Joy. Many of the entries are so personal they seem torn from a diary.

The men who visit Thailand are often sex tourists. For the most part, the bar-girls are from small villages where extreme poverty is not unusual. Thus, when these young women are promised thousands of baht for an evening of dancing in a club, they jump at the opportunity. They are often un-educated by western standards), BUT are not lacking in smarts, as this book makes abundantly clear. Exploitation, at least in this gripping story, is a two-way street. The author is masterful at highlighting the various ways the two cultures clash. If you read nothing else in this book, then at least take a look at the "9 rules" provided by the detective who investigates Joy and Sunan.....five stars, highly recommend!

Private Dancer is a page-turner describing the real underbelly of ex-pat sex tourist life in the seedy districts of Thailand. Stephen Leather writes "Rashomon" style from the viewpoints of all the players that strut their poor time upon the stage. This is the kind of guilty pleasure I love to read on my kindle - this pulp fiction is what the kindle is made for. It is much cheaper than the paper version, easy to read across your all of your devices, and no one else's business what you're reading!

The lead character gets embroiled in a "romance" with a Thai bargirl. It is impossible to read this book without thinking to yourself, "this guy is an idiot!" Yet, like a horror movie in which the victims inevitably walk toward the monster, I was enthralled by the man's journey. Along the way we meet various other degenerate ex-pats that frequent the sex trade. These characters provide some comic relief and a different point of view, so in the end the "truth" of what happened is not clear.

This book has so much real detail that it feels autobiographical. Don't expect a "dirty book" - the author doesn't waste time describing the sex acts in detail. What he does bring to life are the emotions and thoughts of everyone involved in the transaction. The girl selling herself, the guys paying, the bar owner, local Thai men, everyone has their say here. The bargirls' points of view don't appear the most authentic, but they are still interesting to think about.

The book ends up being just like prostitution itself- at its best parts exciting, alluring, and at times pathetic and sad.

About 3 months ago I made the trek to crazy Bangkok. I just now read the ebook from a friend who resides in Chiang Mai Thailand, an American married to a Thai woman.

This was a great read, but darkened my view of Thailand. It is very easy to fall in love with a Thai bargirl and I find myself still having an emotional attachment to one of them. They seemed to have cracked the Westerner Psychological code and know how to push the right buttons. My only savior was that I was only there for 7 days and already had my heart completely crushed by an American gal many years ago, this would not allow me to completely lose myself in passion and love.

I fear going back to Thailand as the temptations are so great and it's so easy to completely lose yourself to several smiling vices. The book illustrates the horrible cycle of loving a bargirl. How a farang gets hooked in and then continues to rehook himself in order to not give up his fantasy of love, from this point the pain and stakes only increase until the final payoff.

I lived in Thailand for three years and this book captures the reality of what occurs there, not only about the bar scene, but many of the cultural differences as well. It also presents a balanced view of East/West relationships in the context of the setting in which it takes place without pandering or insulting the Thai culture in any extreme way.

It was an enjoyable read!

An Anthropologist could not have done better. The books looks at this culture divide from both sides and fairly portrays each sides view. No one is really wrong but sees reality from their own perspective and thus suffer the confusion and misunderstanding that take place. In the end though, any fault must be laid to the outsider who enters a world he knows nothing about and builds a world of false hope and illusion for himself. Through it all one is let into the world of poverty and corruption that entraps everyone involved. PD is a great read and the Stephen Leather is to be congratulated for a job well done. Much enjoyed.