With its garrulously omniscient third-person narration, the book serves as an essay on cinema and televisual history. As a pop culture polymath, he exploits the novel format to lay on thick his lavishly detailed, period Hollywood shop talk and industry gossip. Yet Tarantino has such fun expanding his fictional world, and the results are sufficiently intriguing, as to suggest that more auteurs might consider becoming authors. I haven’t read a film-to-book novelisation since I was a teenager among disreputable genres it’s down there with the reality TV star autobiography. The two versions of Rick and Cliff’s story do share a number of scenes, but even those are altered and lengthened and there numerous new scenes and characters, some of them real-life figures (Steve McQueen has a cameo). Interestingly, it is not a straightforward translation of the events in the film.
Anyone who admired the movie will have a great time with this spin-off work. It’s far better than I expected it to be. Now Tarantino has surprised us all by turning his hand to writing books, beginning with this novelisation.
But everyone a couple of decades older than me, who remembered the late 1960s televisual and cinematic golden-age Hollywood so lovingly elegised, seemed to adore the film. Tarantino’s essential shallowness, which in the past he has alchemised as aesthetic vitality, and his adolescent moral outlook had come to seem dismayingly inflexible: I didn’t feel he could surprise me any more. Despite its charms and Tarantino’s customary flair, I came out of it frustrated and a bit bored, wondering if it was finally time to divorce this film-maker who’d shaped the sense of cinematic possibility of anyone who grew up in the 1990s. Q uentin Tarantino’s most recent film, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, seemed to split audiences along generational lines.