Brando’s pulp fiction wallow goes overboard

Back in 1966, Pauline Kael wrote that Marlon Brando, then riding out the vast mid-career Sargasso between “On the Waterfront” and “The Godfather,” had already become “a self-parodying comedian.” The Brando who emerges in this unexpected literary curio -- a posthumous debut novel, co-written with the late British film director Donald Cammell -- lives up to Kael’s tart assessment.

You turn the pages of “Fan-Tan,” a high-flying pulp tale of 20th century buccaneering on the China Seas, with the mounting sense that the entire unearthed enterprise was intended as a kind of self-lacerating joke, by turns utterly fascinating and horrifically bad. It’s not a stretch to say that “Fan-Tan” is, in many ways, like Brando himself: exasperating, profane, bloated, inconsistent, childish, pretentious and, every great once in a while, brilliant.

It’s set in 1927, when Gen. Chiang Kai-shek was busy sparring with the Communists. Anatole “Annie” Doultry (“rhymes with ‘poultry’ ”) is a Scottish-born American sailor and glamorously compromised rogue (Bogart comes to mind more immediately than Brando) serving time in Hong Kong’s fetid Victoria Gaol for a botched arms deal with a “Polack.” (The joint authors have a freewheeling way with ethnic terminology and stereotypes.)

Upon Annie’s release, we come to know him as a man given to ordering chop suey and Tsingtao in the wake of sexual rampages, who wears “special undershorts” (the better to stash a Walther pistol) and who, despite having a memory “as full of giant holes as an old sock,” fondly recalls (or lies about) his younger days in the British Royal Navy before he got involved in sailing the China Seas, shipping arms on his two-masted schooner, the Sea Change.

When Annie is tapped to participate in a scheme to divest the SS Chow Fa of its cargo of silver, the novel -- like Annie -- tacks out into treacherous, open seas. Madame Lai Choi San, an imperious Chinese gangster and sex bomb, enlists Annie for the risky undertaking, wooing him aboard her junk, Tiger of the Iron Sea. Madame Lai’s seduction technique involves having Annie witness a man being forced to eat one of his own severed toes.

Annie is instantly besotted and agrees to participate in the high-stakes piratical gamble (the title refers to the Chinese casino game), with its promise of high-seas adventure, a huge payoff and quality time with the ever so inscrutable Madame Lai, who has a flair for opaque utterances: “Heaven see very well that we are foolish as children.... Why throw real silver dollar to bottom of sea? Hunh?”

And why throw real money at “Fan-Tan,” which would have stood prohibitively long odds at publication were it not for its movie-legend coauthor? Well, the book is engrossing in ways perhaps never intended by Brando or Cammell, the latter who, one presumes, is the actual author of “Fan-Tan,” which was first sketched out in the late 1970s as a film treatment. (In his professorial afterword, editor David Thomson dates the novel to the early 1980s.)

Like Brando, Cammell -- a Swinging London fixture whose claim to fame was directing Mick Jagger in “Performance” -- was a self-destructive talent driven to exotica (Orientalism and Aleister Crowley), flights of bohemian fancy, delusions of intellectualism, bouts with professional failure and ostentatious acts of disengagement. Where Brando retreated to his own Polynesian atoll (the locale that inspired “Fan-Tan”), Cammell -- whose relationship with Brando unraveled in the wake of “Fan-Tan’s” understandable inability to get off the ground -- orchestrated his own end in 1996, shooting himself in the head.

It’s difficult not to view “Fan-Tan” as a collaboration between two unstable creative minds who turned out to be completely incompatible and yet wholly, disastrously alike.

Running throughout is an aura of Brando-esque contempt -- for the project, for the creative partnership and for the reader, who, by the end, may feel as played as Annie does when he wakes up after a long-awaited night of love with Madame Lai. The pungent episode rivals the famous butter scene in “Last Tango in Paris.” It’s “Fan-Tan’s” most ridiculous moment, and its best.

On the page, Brando’s fabled magnetism and swagger are reduced to mere boorishness, making “Fan-Tan” an artifact of homely kitsch, a sordid collectible for Brando (and, possibly, Cammell) necrophiles. Or it may simply be a money grab that degrades the memory of its authors.

Instead of whipping up a ripping lowbrow yarn shot through with modern malaise and violence like, say, “Chinatown” (or even “Performance”), Brando and Cammell lashed together a leaky seafaring potboiler that manages to both take itself way too seriously and nowhere near seriously enough. As Thomson himself admits, “It is not an uncommon fantasy among Hollywood’s great to think they could be writers if only they had the time, the patience, a pen, or the spelling.” “Fan-Tan” suggests that Brando and Cammell had none of the above.