Plodding script proves Brando was a better actor than writer

Fan-Tan FICTION Marlon Brando and Donald Cammell

WE'VE all heard about actors so dumb they slept with the writer, but how about the ones dumb enough to fancy writing themselves? Actors are not, after all, famed for their way with words. Often enough, Marlon Brando didn't even deign to read his own lines.

Yet here he is, a year on from his death, with his name on the front of a novel. "An epic, riproaring adventure" it screams on the dustjacket, though Fan-Tan turns out to be rather quieter and smaller than that.

The central character is one Anatole Doultry - Annie to his friends - a piano-playing sea captain who has been banged up on phoney gunrunning charges in Hong Kong. We learn that he is a big, big guy. We learn that he is as big as he is because of his penchant for cake-guzzling and cookie-crunching. We learn that though "there was a great deal of the artist within him" he thinks of himself as "talented but unsuccessful".

The plot is familiar from a thousand bad movies. Before his release from jail, Annie saves the life of a fellow prisoner - a Chinese crook in the employ of Madame Lai Choi San - and once back out on the street he is offered a job by her, a spot of piracy on the high seas. Annie suspects her of skulduggery; needless to say, he comes out the eventual winner, sailing off into the sunset like the hero of every action picture before him.

The film critic David Thomson has cuffed Cammell's typescript (which came to light after Brando's death) into shape, but his Afterword is far and away the better read.

. Heinemann, Pounds 16.99.

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