Customer Reviews

The Errol Flynn Novel

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This is not a book about Flynn - but a sleazy novel using Flynn's name-not for flynn fans

"However, if you are a Flynn completist, and you happen to stumble upon a used copy for no more than 50 cents, you might go ahead and add it to your collection - if only to keep it out of the hands of someone else.. Or it might make a useful thing to start the logs burning in your fireplace on a cold winter night. Or still again, it might be worth keeping in one of your drawers for its limited curiosity value, as yet one more piece of garbage about Errol Flynn that has no redeeming value, and is about as bad a book as it could possibly be." Lincoln Hurst

It appears that there is a love/hate relationship with this novel. And it looks as if hate is on the fast-track. Not for me, I found it a bizarre fascinating read. Geoff Nicholson is known as a farcical writer, and I can see some of that exhibited in this novel, but it needs more. This was no laugh out loud novel, sort of a hehehe under your breath. Some of the story is so far fetched that I can envision a movie screen with the characters looking at each other in confusion.

Jake is a down at the heels wanna-be actor, working in a photo shop when one day a former classmate, Sacha, appears, and within a day Jake has been hired to appear in a film about Errol Flynn. Dan Ryan, the director starts sending reams of paper, books about Flynn, music and what not. Jake has difficulty keeping up with all of the info flying at his feet. And then he realizes that he wants to play Errol Flynn. This seems to have been the plan all along and off he goes to make a movie. Nothing is ever as it seems we are told, and that is true here. The film is strange, Errol Flynn is shown as the sexually explicit man he was, warts and all are fully filmed. Dan Ryan, the director becomes more unhinged and the dark side of movie making is exposed. Dan Ryan's, wife Tina, seems to be made of sterner stuff but is that really true? The novel moves from London to Hollywood to Las Vegas and the desert in-between. The charcters are more outlandish and overdone as the story moves on, but that is when the fun really begins. The novel bogs down at times, but at the same time I needed to know the ending of this strangely elusive novel. The sex talk is explicit, but there is nothing here that has not been said time and time again.

This is a novel of obsession, the dark side of Hollywood with a twist. Not enough of a twist to keep Errol Flynn intact, but this was entertaining in a bizarre sort of way. Would Errol Flynn approve? No idea, but why should we care?

Recommended. prisrob 01-01-08

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