Last Tango

Marlon Brando co wrote Fan-Tan in 1970. Fan-Tan, like Brando "is coarse, perverse, idiosyncratic, unapologetically behind the times". Joe Queenan reviews it and recommends it as
a good read

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. This jerry-built saga of post-Castro Havana high jinks is no Gorky Park, but it retains a certain allure as a cultural curiosity precisely because it comes straight out of left field, the last place anyone would expect to find Dan Quayle's long-suffering wife. Other examples are Ethan Hawke's underwrought novels, Martina Navratilova's mystery Breaking Point and Star, Pamela Anderson's long-awaited homage to La Recherche du Temps Perdu. None of these books are especially good, but because 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. Ultimately, the question of whether these oddities cut the mustard becomes irrelevant.

The only thing worth asking is: "Gee willikers! What occasioned this?".

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". Blimey.

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 (aka Mrs Wealth) 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 behaviour was par for the course back on the South China Sea in days of yore, and nobody would dream of taking it personally.

Secretly, Annie is less interested in a big payday than in bedding his sultry employer, an ambition that quite amazingly survives the aforementioned fecal interlude, which most landlubbers would have deemed a relationship deal breaker. In short, Fan-Tan is an old fashioned pot boiler with something for everyone: kinky sex, explosive gunplay, sabotage, high-stakes insect races, betrayal, entirely unexpected bowel movements in unconventional romantic settings and dangerous men who are "terribly thick of thew". They sure don't write them like this anymore.

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, even though he and Cammel had a falling-out when the Scotsman started dating the daughter of Anita Loo, Brando's ex-flame. (They patched things up when Cammel married her.) Brando and his co-author originally conceived of Fan- Tan as a screenplay, but things didn't pan out.

So the book that has now been published is an excavated film treatment lovingly manicured into novel form. Fan-Tan never got close to being made into a movie, in part because Brando wouldn't show it to anyone. Of course, by this point in his career Brando himself was getting a bit thick of thew.

In all honesty, this is merely a so-so tale.

What makes it so interesting, aside from its unusual provenance, is the robust, colourful, 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).

Here is Madame Lai, straight from her appearance at "House of Over-the-Top Flying Daggers", discussing her modus operandi: "I will take the Chow Fa. I will put a hundred men with naked knives among her fine officers and I will wait behind an island and spring out like a Tiger of the Iron Sea and fire my guns into her belly. I have velly, velly number - one gunners, you will see. I will kill the guards, I will kill the passengers, and I will hang the bowels of her captain from this masthead above you." 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, a bit like the dialogue from The Black Shield of Falworth or The Three Amigos. It's the kind of sinewy, tongue-in-cheek prose that always reminds you the authors are working overtime to assemble sentences that will grab your attention, even if it means describing men as being "thick of thew" or reporting that certain cockroaches favour munching on human foot calluses the way "an epicurean rabbi does smoked herring". In short, 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 and Stephen 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. The opportunity to read it was an offer I couldn't refuse.

© The New York Times