Sugar Baby

This is a work of fiction in 33 chapters (84,000 words). The main character, Peter James, is a British, Corporate Account Manager whose plight and exploration of themes is backed by three supporting male protagonists from around Europe. The main plot is interspersed with chapters from the experiences of one of these men, Michael, which occur sometime after the end of the main story. The book finishes with epilogue 6-months after Peter's adventures have ended. Peter's story is a turn-of-the- 21stCentury combination of 'Coming up for air,' 'Burmese Days' 'Lolita' and 'Saint Jack'. The book has two narrators: Peter, delivered in the first person, the main character in the book, who looks forward and backward on his 3-month holiday across the Visayas Islands, and a third-person narrator that mostly follows the travel writer, Michael, but also comments on other protagonists and settings in the main plot. The story occurs in about the late 1990s when pop stardom has entered the current era of overtly sexualisation, using Madonna-like burlesque dancing and synthesized voices, not dissimilar to acts found in escort bars. The Spice Girls have just released their first single and smoking is still allowed on aeroplanes. Through dialogue the story comments on the previous century, the effects of feminism and the permissive society. The book starts with Peter's future lover, Mariana, a 22-year-old Filipina woman separated from a much older husband who she married at the age of 14-years. Peter is then seen flying to and spending a couple of nights in Manila where he tries to date one of the women aircrew. The date is a flop and instead he is used as a chaperone by a group of young air-stewards who are keen to see around the tame parts of Manila's red-light district, which they treat like an amusement park. Time in Manila is used to explore mainstream opinions on sex tourism and to develop the main character. Frustrated by his first days in The Philippines Peter then bungles off in search of a deserted, tropical beach idole. At this point the final person in a love triangle is introduced, Lailani. She is a confident, teenage prostitute and a friend to Mariana. They work together in an escort bar located in a small fishing village called Sabang, on the island of Mindoro. Peter finds Mariana trying to make a living by singing old-fashioned Diva songs. Peter is seduced into a relationship with Mariana and then falls completely in love with her. Mariana's feelings for Peter are left unresolved. She can be viewed as having an affair to ease her into the alien lifestyle of a sex escort, or, as having a genuine relationship from which she realises the impossibility of her situation and then submits to the inevitable. Peter meets with three other characters who are also on a trip of fulfilment of sorts. Gerhard is student counsellor at a German University who has come to extend the promiscuity of his youth and to forget a bust-up with his girlfriend. He is an unashamed, happy-go-lucky sex tourist whose philosophy is: "as long as you are having fun, does it matter?" Another character, Michael, voices a dispassionate and considerate view on the sex tourism he unexpectedly finds in Sabang. Based on the Wheel of Life philosophy of Buddhism, he seeks answers of how to reconcile living as a creature that is both sentient and animal. Kirk is the last character. He is a macho, determined visitor from Switzerland, out to buy a new life as master of his own destiny away from the numbing domesticity of Switzerland and time as a wage slave. After sometime Peter starts to misread the situation he and Mariana are in, which causes Mariana to start to believe the bar pimp, or mummersan, who has been feeding her stories all along. She suddenly sees Peter in a new light, as a feckless foreigner, and now, having crossed a line, she agrees to work as an escourt. Peter recoils in horror when Mariana agrees to be bought by a bar goer. He ends-up having to rescue her in a gunfight, and then flees the town alone. Travelogue takes Peter overland to Boracay with a group of international backpackers he meets along the way. This journey is filled with reflection with, amongst others, a young Swedish man recently married to an older woman. There is a mini-adventure involving a tsunami wave and a deep-sea rescue through which Peter redeems himself in the eyes of his fellow young travellers, who had assumed him old and useless. On Boracay Peter gets mugged and only escapes with his life through the intervention of his now close friends from the boat. He then links-up with Gerhard, who had gone ahead to Boracay to spend the last days of his long break. Thorough dialogue Gerhard and Peter both decide to backtrack and offer themselves to the people they love, with unexpected results in the final four chapters. At the end of the main story Michael gets a journalist posting to Thailand and through Buddhism tries to understand aspects of the human condition linked to Peter's plight. Themes in this book may appeal to the mass market. Buddhism is in vogue at present, a lot of current Hollywood films and even TV have borrowed its concepts, for example; 'The Matrix', 'My name is Earl' and 'Avatar'. This book is of the same genre but adds something new, it emphasises a different part of the religion and adds in concepts from psychology such as; the 'bundle theory' and 'cognitive dissonance.' Inspiration for the relationship between a middle-aged man and a much younger women, especially Lailani, is from Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov, a book that is said to have sold over 50 million copies.The theme of Western men with Asian women still evokes massive preconceptions that have not before been tackled in the way this book attempts. Behind the prejudices of "men with Asian brides" are complex heart-breaking stories of how someone from racist, no-touch cultures, (xenophobic towards Gwailo, Farlang, Dayuhan, Round-Eyed-Devils), are driven to have relationships with despised outsiders. In turn the book explores why Western men are more than ever today driven to turn their backs on a feminised Western world with an evolving cult, with the label of PC, in favour of women and anti-men.