There’s no doubt that Quentin Tarantino is a movie director of brilliance, if not genius. But can he write?
Well he can certainly tell a good story. What we have here is Tarantino’s ninth feature film, a 1960s Hollywood yarn about a fictional actor and his stunt double, but rendered in book form. Rick Dalton is the TV and B-movie actor, while his stuntman, Cliff Booth, ruined his own career by beating up Bruce Lee during a shoot. He’s now reduced to being Rick’s driver and drinking buddy. The two of them are on the slide, but things start to look up when Rick lands a role in a new cowboy TV drama.
Washed up he may be, but Rick still has his mansion in the Hollywood hills, and his new neighbours turn out to be the non-fictional actress Sharon Tate and her husband, the director Roman Polanski. In 1969, Tate was brutally murdered by members of the Charles Manson family, a group of creepy hippies who also appear in the book, floating about in LA’s counter-cultural underworld.
It’s propulsive and engrossing, and at times recreates something of the delirious energy of Tarantino’s movies, which isn’t bad for a debut novel. In the right frame of mind, a reader will devour this in a single sitting, even though it could have done with some cuts — 1960s Hollywood gossip is not quite as interesting as the author supposes.
Like all of Tarantino’s stories, it is a swirling collage of anecdote, flashback and self-reference, delivered here in a kind of Mickey Spillane tough-guy 1950s pulp style. But it’s much more foul-mouthed and sexually frank than any Mike Hammer tale — which takes us to the novel’s main problem: its depiction of women. If the eye-popping misogyny were simply confined to the characters, that would be one thing.
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