Private Dancer – Love, Lies and Death in the Land of Smiles
By Stephen Leather
Published by Three Elephants, 2005
Reviewed by Paul Dorsey

No Joy in go-go-land

The Nation
Published in summer 2005
Another farang novel about the Bangkok bar scene, minus the cops and spies and with little that’s lurid either, “Private Dancer” has been “often described as the best book ever written about the Bangkok bar scene”, according to its author.
With 17 other thrillers like “The Tunnel Rats” and “The Solitary Man” under his belt, “frequent visitor” Stephen Leather couldn’t find a publisher for this one, so he put it on the Internet, where he says it was downloaded more than 60,000 times in five years by people in 40 countries.
“I’ve been getting dozens of e-mails a week asking for the novel to be published, as most people seem to prefer a book they can hold, and put on their shelves,” Leather says in an undated press release, adding enigmatically: “Now that the whole bar scene here is changing, it seemed a good time to finally publish a hard copy.”
Whatever, Three Elephants (an anagram of the author’s name) has whipped the thing out, and while it has some appeal, it boils down to 358 pages of post-colonialist claptrap.
It’s the mother of all cautionary tales about small men in the Big Mango’s bars dallying with demimondaines. Brit travel writer Pete arrives in Thailand, is taken to Nana Plaza and is smitten by pole-hugger Joy, who ends up loving him too much, and vice-versa, if you catch our avalanche – because we’re trying to avoid clichés.
God knows there’s a barge-full in “Private Dancer”, including a full section on Patpong rip-off bars, which ends thus:
“ ‘Let me tell you about Thais, Pete,’ said Bruce, patting me on the back. ‘Sometimes you think you’re in trouble when you’re really not. And sometimes when you think everything is hunky dory, you’re in so much shit they’ll need a submarine to find you. Nothing is as it seems, Grasshopper.’”
This is just one character’s opinion, of course, but there are so many like it here – and the old hands are all windbags who talk to Thais in Tarzan-speak – that it’s offensive anyway. Fans of “Private Dancer” might say it doubles as a guidebook for incoming foreign guys, but is this really the way we want Thailand explained?
The aforementioned appeal of the book is in the way it hops from one character’s viewpoint, rendered interview style, to another’s. Thus Pete and Joy, like a pair of suspects in adjoining police interview rooms, toss out his’n’hers arguments. Sprinkled in like some kind of authoritative phrik nee noo are “extracts from ‘Cross Cultural Complications of Prostitution in Thailand’ by Professor Bruno Mayer”, but these are no less banal than the rest.
Leather’s a good writer, and the novel well edited. Though the pace lurches with the ponderous effort of trying to stitch a thoughtful story out of such lame experiences, the set-up and denouement are as satisfying as anyone might expect from this bafflingly self-reproducing sub-genre.
There’s a line about a go-go-bar shower show that could really be about the book: “It wasn’t much of a turn-on, though tourists and first-timers seem to get a kick out of it.”
“Private Dancer” is utterly humourless. Sure, it’s funny reading about a farang sitting down with his prostitute “girlfriend” with pen and paper trying to figure out how she spends all her money, but it’s not seen as funny here. It’s just another kilometre clicking by, another tableau float in the parade carrying Pete into the arms of Doom.
And the epilogue’s “whatever happened to” snapshots of the cast leave you between a snicker and another roll of the eyeballs.
“It was as if I was involved in some weird game, but I hadn’t been told all the rules,” Pete moans halfway through his self-inflicted torture.
So he takes revenge by setting Joy up, with not one but two gormless mini-scams. No one benefits, of course. Then he learns of a similarly scammed Yank, and has the witless gall to be in awe at this latest victim’s gullibility!
En route to Doom, Pete hires a private dick to spy on his girl, and in the end it’s this Phiraphan who supplies the reasonable Thai view (and much relief to the sensible reader). He is scathing as he lays down the law, not just about farang marrying bargirls, but sex tourists too, both short-term and long-term (“wearing a Harley T-short stretched over a massive beer gut and a goatee beard disguising a weak chin … even the attractive ones fall down in the IQ department”).
Compared to Phiraphan, everyone else in “Private Dancer” is moronic. So is the book.