THE delightful French word insolite refers to something so completely unexpected that it causes the beholder to stand back and marvel. A case in point is the Eiffel Tower, still viewed by some Parisians as an edifice that doesn't quite fit in. Another is Marilyn Quayle's 1992 thriller, "Embrace the Serpent.". Other examples are Ethan Hawke's underwrought novels, Martina Navratilova's mystery "Breaking Point" and "Star," Pamela Anderson's long-awaited homage to "À la Recherche du Temps Perdu."
None of these books are especially good, but they're bad in a way that distinguishes them from most hobbyist fiction, they fall into the same category as Kevin Spacey's Bobby Darin biopic, "Beyond the Sea"; Jack Kevorkian's jazz recording, "A Very Still Life"; and Phyllis Diller's buy-two-get-one-free paintings
"Fan-
tan" (the title refers to a Chinese game of chance) is a thrilling example of this genre. Written more than 25 years ago as a
film treatment by Marlon Brando and Donald Cammell, the mysterious Scotsman who directed the 1970's cult classic "Performance" and then basically dropped off the face of the earth, "Fan-Tan" is the
kind of high-seas extravaganza nobody writes anymore because everybody's too busy churning out books about land-based serial killers, perhaps concealing the Spear of Longinus beneath the Shroud of Turin in the glove compartment of a Dodge Neon that once belonged to Mary Magdalene's luckless descendant, Rhiannon Schwartz. Except for a few ribald scenes - one where the heroine has defecated on the hero's chest and another where the hero makes love to his paramour using a handful of stolen pearls as sex aids - this is the kind of
novel you could easily give as a birthday gift to a teenage boy. With loads of derring-do about bloodthirsty pirates, unscrupulous warlords, picaresque whores, incorruptible Sikh security guards and aphrodisiacal minerals, "Fan-Tan" is nothing if not a ripping yarn.
As the novel opens in 1927, a portly, dissolute, middle-aged, Scottish-American sea captain with the unlikely name of Annie Doultry is serving out a six-month sentence for gun running in a forlorn Hong Kong prison. Marking the days, he amuses himself by arranging cockroach races, balancing a tea mug on "the great hairy pampas of his chest" and ruminating on the cultural subtext and long-term psychological effects of public flogging. (It hurts, it's racist, and nobody likes it.) Needless to say, Annie has been set up by a rival who comes to a sorry end; needless to say, he is down on his luck in a kind of "Treasure of the Shanghai Madre" way. His predicament, which started out as a "rebellious pimple on his psyche," has now swollen into "a boiling boil on the soul's posterior."
Seeking to make one big score before packing it in forever - the plotline of roughly 75,000 motion pictures - Annie hooks up with a mysterious buccaneer named Madame Lai Choi San, who is both a she-wolf of the high seas and a tigress in the sack. Madame Lai persuades the skipper to take a job as a wireless operator on the cruise ship Chow Fa, laden with precious silver, thus enabling her swashbuckling minions to seize control of the vessel. Though this will make him complicit in the deaths of several innocent crewmen, no stigma attaches to him because such duplicitous behavior was par for the course back on the South China Sea in days of yore, and nobody would dream of taking it personally.
"Fan-Tan" makes a lot more sense after you peruse the brief but highly informative afterword by the distinguished film critic David Thomson, who edited the
book and assembled its final chapter. Seemingly, Marlon Brando never forgave himself for passing up the chance to play the enigmatic gangster Chas opposite Mick Jagger in "Performance. The book that has now been published is an excavated film treatment lovingly manicured into novel form
In all honesty, this is merely a so-so tale. What makes it so interesting, aside from its unusual is the robust, colorful, anachronistic, occasionally ludicrous, politically incorrect
writing. "Fan-Tan" is the very opposite of a novel like "The Da Vinci Code," an engrossing though fundamentally idiotic thriller by an Amherst graduate who somehow manages to
write like a determined community college dropout. In contrast, Brando and Cammell often find themselves out on a limb, but it's a limb you can get to only if you already know how to write (but occasionally have relapses to a time when you couldn't).
Obviously, this can't be identified as good writing - at least not in the narrow, technical sense of the term - but it's certainly rambunctious wordplay, full of gusto and flair. It's the kind of book where you just have to clear a side and get the women and children off the playing field.
To its credit, "Fan-Tan" never sounds mass-produced or generic; it never has the weary, phoned-in quality of books by Tom Clancy andStephan King. Instead, it sounds like the boys had a heap of fun cranking out this page turner while throwing back a few hundred martinis. There's a lot to be said for this approach; if you can't write a great novel, at least write a peculiar one and have a few laughs along the way.
It's too bad Brando didn't spend more time writing fiction. Like him, "Fan-Tan" is coarse, perverse, idiosyncratic, unapologetically behind the times. It is an opportunity to read him.