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Bangkok, we all know, is a paradise of earthly delights, just exotic enough to make visitors feel they've had a glamorous adventure, even if they've only been sampling sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll. Hospitals that turn men into women, or something in between. Russian mafiosi with white slaves on hand in the beach resort of Pattaya. Cops shaking hands with yaba dealers while soft girls get the better of tough guys in Soi Cowboy, the Nana Entertainment Plaza and the grandmama-san of them all, Patpong. All these night-tour fixtures feature prominently in the latest work of foreign fiction to be presented as the last word on the city of fallen angels, Bangkok 8. Yet even the most smitten reader may feel he's seen it all before.

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Meet Thailand on the page—or on the screen—and you can be forgiven for not realizing that it's a largely rural country, with a complex history, daylight hours and a taste for shyness. The Bangkok of the imagination is heavily made up and dangerously close to underage. And whether you're watching Emmanuelle or reading Bangkok 8, you're likely to conclude that "old Asia hands" are not so much on the pulse as on the thighs of the Land of Smiles. Produced in large numbers by men of a certain age, most depictions of Thailand are as far from its soil and its real lives as the Skytrain that whisks the affluent above the streets of Bangkok.

Every place, of course, gets simplified in the world's imagination, not least that other city of angels known as L.A. Foreigners writing on Japan nearly always claim to get to the heart of the elusive country by describing an elusive, and bewitching, young Japanese woman (I wrote such a book myself). Visitors to India cannot resist reflecting on poverty and opulence. And I sometimes wish a literary customs inspector would check all foreigners coming out of Hong Kong for references to triad gangs and haughty "second wives."

Besides, a skeptic might argue that Thailand has no one to blame but itself. The country is so expert at giving the foreigner what he wants and taking him in with charm that many a foreigner comes away feeling charmed, and a little taken in. And the latest generation of Thailand-based fiction does at least acknowledge that paradise comes with a price tag. In movies like Bangkok Hilton and Breakdown Palace, and especially in Alex Garland's novel The Beach, Thailand is less an enticing stranger than the dull ache and empty wallet she leaves behind her.

Yet the feeling persists that even the latest generation of Polaroid depictions has something of the glitzy fictitiousness of a Khao San Road knockoff. I, like many a newcomer, wrote a long piece on Bangkok when first I arrived, 20 years ago, and my reflection seldom left the bars. As a male in his 20s, speaking no Thai and on his first trip to Southeast Asia, I could not begin to know anything more than the hotel workers, tuk-tuk drivers and bar girls who clustered round me. But now 6 million visitors are pouring into Thailand every year, and many of them never leave. Is it too much to hope that someone might go past the "lavish hotels and low-life bars" (in the typically overheated words of a back-cover blurb) which leave the visitor "sucked into the jagged netherworld of Bangkok"?

Bangkok 8, as it happens, does have more verve and urbanity than most. It goes one step beyond the Patpong fiction of old by centering not on a bar girl or her foreign suitor but on the conflicted son of a bar girl and her foreign suitor. Author John Burdett, a sometime lawyer in Hong Kong, conjures up voices and digs up research much more commandingly than many in the flashing-red-light genre. Yet even he actually quotes from the Lonely Planet guidebook at one point and has a radio playing in the background to offer a convenient lowdown on the local sex trade. In the nonsensical Buddhism that Burdett tries to squeeze in, his main character is a so-called arhat, or "Buddhist saint," who nonetheless shows us jade phalluses on computer screens and men who whip women until they die.

This is a Bangkok that only a farang, or foreigner, could love, and it felt oddly familiar even 50 years ago, when Jack Reynolds gave us his nakedly titled Woman of Bangkok. What we need now is a Thailand not for export only and not confined to the shadows of Bangkok. Women occasionally escape the Suzy Wong—headed treatment (which is why Mai Pen Rai Means Never Mind, a straightforward diplomat wife's account of Bangkok in the '60s, still sells), as do those who step out of the city (as in Tim Ward's What the Buddha Never Taught). For the rest, though, it remains a curious—but telling—irony that the one country in Asia that boasts of never having been conquered is colonized in the imagination night after night after night.

• Pico Iyer
• Cheap sex. Cheap drugs. Sordid foreigners. Books about Thailand rarely escape the tawdry clichés