Fridae

Written in his early 20s after Hunter S Thompson discovered alcohol but before he discovered psychoactive drugs – i.e. before Hunter S Thompson became the Hunter S Thompson – The Rum Diary sat for almost four decades on the gonzo journalist’s shelf before his good friend and big screen counterpart Johnny Depp (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) persuaded him to publish it. In 2011, we have the chance to watch the screen adaptation.

To be sure, this is not quite the Hunter S Thompson that we have grown to love and respect, but a sparkling work of juvenilia that hints at the future greatness of the author. The Rum Diary is a more-or-less autobiographical account of the adventures of Thompson, as refracted through his alter ego Jack Kemp and played by Johnny Depp again, in Puerto Rico in the late 1950s.

Thrown into the deep end by a cynical editor running an ailing newspaper, the prospective muckraker and hellraiser Thompson/Kemp is initiated by his newspaper colleagues into the excesses, hypocrisy, easy wealth and cynical plundering of the poor by high society that would subsequently inform the manic rage of Thompson’s later mature works.

On the unspoiled island of Puerto Rico, fat Americans spend their vacations cooped up in bowling alleys in hotels while rich developers (a specimen played here by a smarmy and arrogant Aaron Eckhart) plot with military men and right-wing capitalists to buy up bits of the island for mad profits to fuel their society magazine cover lifestyles and collection of trophy girlfriends, and workers of all stripes and ranks get cheated by their paymasters – while everywhere, everyone drinks rum, gambles on cockfighting, finds silly ways to get high on illicit substances, and lives like there’s no tomorrow worth looking forward.

A brilliant mood piece, The Rum Diary manages to evoke all at once the heady allure, desperation, and loathing that such a world encompasses, and weaves a tale that explains just what’s so wrong with this world. Looking back from the perspective of our soon to be post-scarcity world, I'm tempted to say that The Rum Diary might not be a piece of juvenilia but a Thackeray-like panoramic portrait of the post-war era where fortunes and fame could be made so easily without effort, and the lives of gargantuan excesses in high and low that this fuelled.