Spectator, The: Mapping a prefab paradise

THE RUM DIARY by Hunter S. Thompson Bloomsbury, 16.99, pp. 204

This is a timely reissue of Hunter S. Thompson's first novel, written in the late Fifties at the age of 22. Terry Gilliam's film of the famously debauched Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is currently doing the rounds, while on the book front Thompson's recent Better than Sex, concerning none other than Slick Willy Clinton, is wonderfully prescient. Thompson's socalled Gonzo journalistic style draws together all the disparate threads of postwar American ennui and activism and offers an iconoclastic fusion of countercultural energies in a single passage. So, for instance, we learn in Thompson's great record of the 1972 US elections, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, that he was chosen out of the entire media core to be the journalist allowed to ride in Richard Nixon's limo and engage in a relaxing chat exclusively about pro football. This is the offbeat essence of the Gonzo style which, as it took off in the early Sixties, forced Thompson to put The Rum Diary on hold. Forty years after it was written, the novel completes a full circle in the creation of the author's journalistic self.

It tells the story of the hard-drinking hack, Paul Kemp, who flies down to Puerto Rico to work for the American San Juan daily newspaper, continually in danger of going under and run by a handful of dedicated writers and a mob of unruly degenerates. The sensational blurb promises 'A voodoo orgy of murder, sex and craziness from the Gonzo king' but this is not really what we get. Instead the novel is remarkable for Thompson's presentation of a kind of stillness and frenzy intermingled, a sweat-drenched stasis caught in the rhythm of endless rum-soaked days.

There was a strange and unreal air about the whole world I'd come into. It was amusing and vaguely depressing at the same time. Here I was, living in a luxury hotel, racing around a half Latin city in a toy car that looked like a cockroach and sounded like a jet fighter, sneaking down alleys and humping on the beach, scavenging for food in shark-infested waters, hounded by mobs yelling in a foreign tongue - and the whole thing was taking place in quaint old Spanish Puerto Rico, where everyone spent American dollars and drove American cars and sat around roulette wheels pretending they were in Casablanca.

We are at a midpoint between the hardboiled hacks of the Forties and the strungout hippy beachcombers of the Sixties and Kemp is ideally placed in the Puerto Rican prefab paradise to contemplate the slide.

I had always been an observer, one who arrived on the scene and got a small amount of money for writing what he saw and whatever he could find out by asking a few hurried questions.

The hurried questions asked are never too deep, but it is the surface sheen they articulate that absorbs the journalist narrator. The fear and loathing of The Rum Diary is closer to that of the Campaign Trail than Las Vegas, but effectively combines both extremes; the stupefying effect of the rum bottle on the narrative makes the quick, uneasy acts of love and intense, violent outbursts the more unsettlingly delineated. The 22-year-old author writes from the perspective of a narrator ten years older and the effect could be as unnerving as when we find Quentin Tarantino obsessed with mid-life crisis before his time in Jackie Brown. Instead, the world-weary Kemp fits into a rootless cycle which the born-to-be journalist Thompson could already clearly map out. The author, one of the greatest chroniclers of the inconsistencies and self-destructiveness of the late 20th-century American psyche, now lives in a fortified compound on the south coast of Puerto Rico. In just the same curious and compelling fashion, The Rum Diary contains the seeds and the chewed stalks of the career it anticipates and strives to book-end.