FAN-TAN: Marlon Brando and Donald Cammell

Fan-Tan
By Marlon Brando and Donald Cammell (Knopf)

The story of the making of this novel is as interesting as the book itself -- the tale of a Scottish-American sea captain who signs on with some Chinese pirates in the South Pacific during the 1920s.

The late Marlon Brando struck up a friendship with Donald Cammell during the 1960s when the actor was in France shooting The Young Lions. The two eccentrics had many character similarities and decided to collaborate on this ultimately unfinished project. "There were profound streaks of fatalism and self-destruction in both Brando and Cammell that were played out to the sinister music of southern California and the business," writes editor and film historian David Thomson in an afterword that seeks to explain their unusual and sometimes rocky relationship. (He also finished the last chapter.) Brando turned his back on the Hollywood star system and systematically threw away his God-given good looks. He died last year at 80. Cammell, less of a creative success in film and other art circles and with his mind disintegrating into deep manic depression, committed suicide in 1996. But it was back in the 1970s when the enigmatic film star came up with the story-line and roughed out what he apparently hoped would end up as a screenplay. Cammell polished it into a novel, the unfinished manuscript emerging only after both men were dead. Our hero is Capt. Anatole Doultry, Annie for short, who at the beginning of the story is just getting out of Hong Kong's notorious Victoria Gaol after a six-month stretch. He had been framed on a gun-running charge.

In a shady Macao bar-casino where they play the Chinese card game of Fan-Tan (the novel reeks with period detail), Annie joins forces with a true dragon lady, the beautiful but ruthless gangster Madame Lai Choi San. The attraction is both sexual and monetary, for she plans to rob a major silver bullion shipment on the high seas and needs Annie's expertise in the still-evolving science of shipboard radio to pull it off. Annie has some moral fibre but the deal is irresistible... if he can trust her cutthroat Chinese gang and they him. Actually rather slim on plot, this somewhat old-fashioned swashbuckling tale (the alluring dust cover is even a replica of a 1930s pulp publication) is dense with detail of the colourful characters and the time and place and shows considerable research on everything from nautical jargon to regional politics to seafaring philosophy.

In reading, it's not hard to picture that Brando of Last Tango in Paris days in the role of the reluctant and droll swashbuckler Annie Doultry. An interesting legacy from the screen legend. Reviewer: John Cay