Retro Review: The Rum Diary by Hunter S. Thompson

I finished rereading The Rum Diary last night and it left a much greater impression on me the second time around. It is not Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas but something more straightforward, written before Thompson fully developed his erratic style.

In The Rum Diary, you sink into the sweltering heat of San Juan, Puerto Rico where Paul Kemp is working as a shifty journalist. Kemp has just entered his thirties and feels that his former unshakable confidence is behind him as he makes his way “over the hill.” He is surrounded by his co-workers; all working anxiously and half-heartedly for The Daily News which they’re sure is on its last legs.

“My first feeling was a wild desire to drive a stake in the sand and claim the place for myself. The beach was white as salt, and cut off from the world by a ring of steep hills that faced the sea. We were on the edge of a large bay and the water was that clear, turquoise colour that you get with a white sand bottom. I had never seen such a place. I wanted to take off all my clothes and never wear them again.”

Sala, the photographer, claims his skills could afford him a job anywhere but spends his time fretting over the state of the paper. Yeamon, another writer, is a reckless and impulsive hotshot, too stubborn to give anybody an inch. His girlfriend, Chenault is an attractive young blonde who Kemp takes a liking to immediately upon seeing her at the airport in New York.

The Caribbean boomtown is crawling with wealthy and Americans, erecting casinos, hotels and numerous bowling alleys all over the island. Kemp’s boss, Lotterman, comes to claim his share of the pie but struggles to do so with employees who are as dysfunctional as he is. After their 12-8 pm shift, the crew gathers at Al’s–a house converted into a bar with the cheapest drinks in town and hamburgers as its sole food option. The instability of the job leads the characters to drink heavily and their problems are amplified when their lives intertwine with the rum, the heat, the violence, the lust, the ocean, the corruption, the sweat and the impending downfall of The Daily News.

“With the palms zipping past and the big sun burning down on the road ahead, I had a flash of something I hadn’t felt since my first months in Europe—a mixture of ignorance and a loose, ‘what the hell’ kind of confidence that comes on a man when the wind picks up and he begins to move in a hard straight line toward an unknown horizon.”

Thompson was just twenty-two when he wrote the first draft in 1959 and it was not published until 1998. He didn’t believe it was fit to be published but was in need of money. He referred to the process as “the sloppiest job of Book Publishing I've ever seen.” Thompson was unsatisfied with the book after working for many years, but it sold well and received favourable reviews.

Though the characters are all on the edge of a nervous breakdown, it’s a pleasant feeling to be surrounded by the lot of them and their Caribbean world. When I first picked the book up, I had just read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and was expecting something similar. Now, having read a good amount of Thompson’s writing, The Rum Diary comes off as a clear and sharp novel worked out by a young writer looking for the “great American novel.” And though he says he was never able to beat the “damned Great Gatsby,” The Rum Diary is a full novel that pulls the reader nicely into the city of San Juan in the late 1950s, and slowly unravels into a loose and sultry chaos.