This is an offer you can refuse

Fan Tan by Marlon Brando and Donald Cammell (Heinemann, Pounds 16.99)

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. It is more than most of them can do to read the bits of dialogue that aren't their own.

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, rip-roaring adventure," it screams on the dust jacket, though Fan Tan turns out to be rather quieter and smaller than that. Like so many of Brando's movies, the novel is more character study than driven narrative.

The character in question is one Anatole Doultry - Annie to his friends a piano-playing sea captain who has been banged up on phoney gunrunning charges in a Hong Kong prison when first we meet him. And meet him we do. Brando is at lengthy pains in these early pages to give us a fully rounded portrait. 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". We learn of his gift for mimicry, and of his habit of slipping into other personalities for no good reason. We learn of his belief that "Chinese women were extremely attractive".

And we learn that, though vain, he's a bit of a stunner himself: "Annie had often looked at himself in the mirror ...

It stressed equally the deceptive youth and petulance of Doultry's mouth and the inexpressible, faltering beauty of his eyes ... His hair was not so thick ..."

Who could Marlon have in mind?

The bigger mystery is why he should have wanted to star in this story.

Throughout his career, Brando made it plain that he thought little of the movies. They were, he said, formulaic, predictable, intelligence-insulting; above all, they told you nothing about what was going on in the real world.

All of which may be true, though quite how Fan Tan, the half- baked ideas and rambling notes for which Brando asked his modernist filmmaker friend Donald Cammell to turn into a novel, differs from such productions is a question that will defeat his most fervent fan. Its faux-poetic, early Marc Bolan-style aside - Annie isn't just a large man, he is "terribly thick of thew" - the novel never surprises you or goes anywhere you don't expect.

The plot is familiar from a thousand bad movies. Just 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 on the street he is offered a job by her. Would he, she asks, care to help her out with a spot of piracy on the high seas? But of course, Madame. Needless to say, Annie suspects her of skulduggery; needless to say, he is cleverer than her and comes out the winner, sailing off into the sunset like the hero of every action picture before him.

The great film critic David Thomson has cuffed Cammell's typescript (which came to light only after Brando's death) into a semblance of shape, but there is no denying that his afterword is much the better read.

Sensitive, wide-ranging and characteristically full of insight, it is one of the best pieces you will ever read on either Brando or Cammell. Otherwise, I'm afraid this is an offer you can refuse.

(c)2005. Associated Newspapers Ltd.. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.