Have you read?: The Rum Diary

I wasn’t a big Hunter S. Thompson fan. Despite the hype among my fellow teens for his Gonzo journalism, and the never-ending (and boringly predictable) enthusiasm for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, he was never on my list of favourite writers. Sure, he was good for a few laughs and slyly knowing references. But beyond that he didn’t really stick with you; which is a tragedy, a real shame, because his second (and only recently published) novel is a work of literary genius.

Alright, maybe ‘literary genius’ is a bit much. I can’t help thinking, though, that if monotonous hacks like Ernest Hemingway could get their work into the literary hall-of-fame, then surely The Rum Diary deserves a sparkling place above them. As a young and aspiring writer, Thompson used to type out novels by Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald to educate himself about their writing styles, and it shows. The Rum Diary, it seems, was his attempt to out-Hemingway Hemingway. And he succeeded.

The novel reads like one of Ernest’s tales of masculine self-doubt and rediscovery, only with much more humour and much less tedious introspection. When Hemingway’s heroes talk to themselves, you want them to shut up and do something. When Thompson’s hero starts a conversation with himself, you actually want to hear what he has to say. All of which only makes it more of a pity that the novel, really a piece of fictional autobiography, remained unpublished for 38 years.

The story begins with Paul Kemp (a thinly disguised Thompson) growing tired of New York and boarding a plane to San Juan, Puerto Rico, to begin a new job at the major English-language paper The Daily News. On the plane he sees a beautiful woman and subdues an irate old passenger by punching him in the throat. Once on the ground, he proceeds to inspect the bad state of the island and takes up residence in his new apartment (really a converted storage room with no windows).

At his new job, he befriends many of the paper’s staff and the editor, a former communist that overcompensates by extolling the wonders of free-market capitalism, who is convinced the paper will collapse by the following Monday. He starts hanging out and drinking rum in Al’s Backyard, which purports to be an officially licensed bar. He meets the photojournalist Yeaman, whose girlfriend Chenault, it turns out, was the beautiful woman he first encountered on the plane.

Yeaman lives in equally shoddy accommodation – a single-room hut on the beach – acts like a borderline psychopath, and treats his girlfriend like a slave. None of which seems to bother anybody. Kemp, however, grows increasingly attracted to Chenault, a girl he knows he shouldn’t, and can never have. The reader is left to wonder how much is genuine attraction, and how much is Kemp’s desire to remain young. In fact, Kemp is also left wondering. He becomes obsessively worried about growing old and “going over the hill”. Not to ruin the ending, but we’re left with a sense of unresolved tension, yet a subtle increase in maturity – even if it is Hunter S. Thompson’s kind of maturity.

In sum, The Rum Diary is Thompson at his creative best. By providing characters who are relatable, funny (albeit in a violent and alcoholic sense), and genuinely confused about where they are going and what to do with their lives, Thompson accomplished what his idol Hemingway never could – make the reader give a damn about characters who are outwardly unlikable. And it’s probably one of the funniest serious books ever written. Well worth a read, it’s Thompson’s finest book and it will definitely stick with you.

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