The first work of written fiction by Quentin Tarantino is, to all intents and purposes, a novelisation of his movie “Once Upon A Time…In Hollywood”. And, thank the Gods, it is exactly what you would expect a Tarantino movie to be like…but in word form.
The physical appearance of the book is important - it is meant to resemble a 1970s-era mass-market paperback, the sort of cheap book you used to find in an American supermarket (and possibly still do for all I know). It looks and feels like a cheap book - which is what it’s meant to be. Pulp fiction, to coin a phrase.
For those who have seen it, the book version of a washed-up TV star differs from the film in several ways, which I won’t spoil, but there is a new, terrifying scene involving one of Charles Manson’s cronies. Elsewhere, QT digs deep into Manson’s failed but weirdly promising music career and stuntman Cliff Booth’s backstory is filled in. Also, Tarantino indulges himself with excellent passages about acting, B movies, sex scenes in films, foreign movies etc. You can tell he enjoyed writing this book.
Tarantino is not out to impress us with the intricacy of his sentences or the nuance of his psychological insights - he is not out to endear himself to Guardian readers. This is grossly funny and often violent book, and Tarantino writes (and films) some of the best/worst violence out there. It is sophisticated but rough. If he’d written it better, he’d have written it worse. It’s a mass-market paperback that reeks of mass-market paperbacks, and is all the better for it.
Better than the film? Possibly. It certainly doesn’t defame it by existing. It expands the story in a way that does it visceral justice. Tarantino has defied expectations (mine included) by writing a page-turner that is brutally titillating, shockingly salacious and quite, quite brilliant.
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