BOOK REVIEW BILL MACPHERSON
The Rum Diary Hunter S. Thompson (Simon & Schuster)
“The vile swine are closing in, crazed bastards wanting to brutalize and pummel me mercilessly, intent on savagely beating me into unconsciousness if I don’t produce the goods…”
Actually, that would be my
publisher (just kidding, boss!) You get the gist, though. This is the late, great Gonzo we are talking about here, the legendary Hunter S. Thompson’s long supressed first novel. It’s a fine read – booze-soaked, adrenaline-stoked and revived from the “bury it for a long time” wishes of the author. His first novel shows tantalizing
glimpses of the avenging angel persona Thompson would become in classics like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail and the wonderfully titled Generation of Swine. That he gained initial public raves by hanging with, writing about and ultimately
getting savagely stomped by the Hell’s Angels seems almost an aside − sort of a rite of passage necessary to establishing his credo on the way to creating his rabid cult following and exalted status. He sure could write, and lived what he wrote. Eventually, though, his decadent
lifestyle caught up with him. In December, 2005, fading as a writer and beset by health woes from a lifetime of hard living, Thompson put one of his many firearms (the guy was a gun freak) to his temple and pulled the trigger. A bravura writer, he went out in a fitting manner − literally with a bang. His instructions to have his ashes shot into the Colorado sky from a cannon were adhered to by his many close friends including Johnny Depp, who stars in the recent movie version of this Puerto Rico-set novel. Written in the first person, The
Rum Diary is the tale of a loose-at- the-skids, 30-something journalist named Paul Kemp. It’s Thompson without a doubt, cutting his alcohol- honed teeth in the seedy, open-for- business development of sleepy San
Juan in the late 1950s. The novel is relatively
straightforward in its telling of Thompson’s (Kemp’s) time in Puerto Rico. There are flaws − like any first novel has − and not a hell of a lot of plot, but it is a fascinating glimpse into Caribbean life pre-development. Even more importantly, the novel hints at the in-your-face, part-of-the- story style that would become Gonzo journalism. Kemp is newly arrived in the
city to work for a fading English daily. Quickly sizing up the ennui and general craziness of the paper, he settles into the lifestyle (a booze- soaked one; he and his newspaper cronies seem to exist almost solely on copious amounts of rum, beer and the occasional round of burgers at the seedy watering hole called Al’s that opens the story) of little work and much drinking. Thompson, living the life thinly
disguised as Paul Kemp, gets to know and expand on the privileges and pitfalls of the ex-pat lifestyle. He paints an alcohol-infused picture that is not the nirvana one might expect. Instead, it’s one where the natives are mostly sullen and resentful at best and violent at worst, knowing the Americanization of their island is contiinued on page 41
40 BOUNDER MAGAZINE
www.bounder.ca
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