Once Upon a Time in Hollywood by Quentin Tarantino review – from auteur to author

You've seen the film, now read the director's own novelisation. And it turns out that his way with words is infectious and fun

Quentin Tarantino's most recent film, Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood, seemed to split audiences along generational lines. 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. 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. 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.

Now Tarantino has surprised us all by turning his hand to writing books, beginning with this novelisation. It's far better than I expected it to be. Anyone who admired the movie will have a great time with this spin-off work. Interestingly, it is not a straightforward translation of the events in the film. 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).