Temptation is a wide and well paved boulevard. Impossible to miss, unlike the road to salvation; but, sadly, it is a road we all travel to some degree, if we live long enough, and if only in our minds. “The Rum Diary” signposts well such a road.
Hunter Stockton Thompson, before his ashes, mixed with gunpowder, were fired from a canon, a fitting fireworks display, was only twenty two when he wrote “The Rum Diary. It was 1961 and six months as a journalist for the Puerto Rican newspaper el Sportivo gave him this take-home view of his time there. Writing and publishing are different species and it was 1998 before his manuscript finally surfaced as a book.
If you’ve read any writing by Hunter S, no matter how brief, you will already know how quickly he limbers up. Once his boilers reach maximum pressure, his words fly across the page at breakneck speed, ever more cruel and and ever more grotesque, building and building and building, until finally you are reading the entrancing writing of a cackling maniac. And then he seems to slump in his wooden round-backed swivel chair, hunch forward over his sweating typewriter and despair. Despair for himself, for you, for all humanity.
The tale of “The Rum Diary” is quite straightforward; drunkenness, laziness, lechery, debauchery, deceit and cowardice. And all these anti-virtues swarm together under the one word – RUM!
The lives of a group of fellow journalists revolve around all these attributes as Hunter S Thompson’s novel takes us down through this spiral of failing men, out of their culture, mad and macho, bravely deceiving themselves like foreign carp desecrating a fragile inland river.
There is, as there always is, a larger picture at work. The money to be made developing Puerto Rico in the early sixties is a magnet for corporate grifters and these high flyers mix uneasily, but readily, with a poverty stricken, life loving, under-populace.
I admire writers like Thompson who can write so well about people who behave so poorly and treat one another so badly. It is hard to like anyone in a Hunter S Thompson story but it is hard to hate them entirely either. There is that faint whiff of “there but for the grace of God” when you read the last sentence, turn the last page and close the book.
At the End of the Day 