Books
It is all too easy to bemoan Hunter S Thompson's repugnant character having read very little or none of his work; the gun-toting wannabe shock-jock is offensive in everything he does.
Unfortunately for Thompson, who cultivates this view from his fortified compound near Aspen, this is now achieved with a tedium foreign to his early writing. Kingdom of Fear, out in paper-back, begins with the story of Thompson's first interrogation by the FBI, aged nine, patching together new and old material to create an extraordinary life story.
Thompson is able to demonstrate his comic turn of phrase early in the novel, when, we are told, his father tries to exonerate him in the eyes of two FBI agents by telling them: "I told you he was a moron."
The tense situation carefully built up by Thompson is relieved at once, to brilliant comic effect, in a rare demonstration of his skill as a writer.
The 'Godfather of Gonzo's' latest book is characterised by unbound linguistic bravado, tales of intense drink and drug abuse, and crazed violence along with unashamed revelling in fast cars and big guns.
Indeed, one begins to suspect that Thompson has published such a small amount of fiction because such a large amount of it goes into his non-fiction work, but this is the stuff of Thompson's, successful, career, and a trait with which his readers will already be familiar.
It is unfortunate that Kingdom of Fear boasts neither the new material, nor presents Thompson's anecdotes and diatribes, in an original enough manner to compensate for the malingering spectre of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas that has travelled with the author since its success.
In Kingdom of Fear only Thompson's intense vanity matches the degree of intrusion of his most famous book.
An interesting example of the author's opinion of himself can be found on the cover of Nick McDonnell's interesting debut novel Twelve. Thompson proudly asserts with all his literary authority that: "Nick McDonnell is the real deal," while suggesting he is "afraid" that "[McDonnell] will do for his generation what I did for mine."
Thompson does not seem to realise that he holds minor cult status among a generation of teenagers touched by him for the first and only time in the 1998 film of Fear and Loathing (but then neither do the UK publishers of Twelve).
Although Kingdom of Fear is littered with fashionable anti-Bush slurs and Thompson's efforts to get himself, or friends, into political office, such as his own attempt to become Sheriff of Aspen under his "Freak Power Platform," his isolationism smacks of his right-wing enemies.
As with so many of Thompson's tales, this one of political non-conformity leads to the necessity of an armed guard around the compound, and is littered with forays into quasi-political riots.
On the back of the new edition The Sunday Times gleefully promises: "Reasoned debate? In your dreams," but one wonders if the crazed exaggeration of earlier work is appropriate for a journalist so concerned with politics.
Like Michael Moore, a more palatable character, Thompson cannot write more than a few paragraphs on Bush and war without mentioning the "global oil industry" and their power over him.
Thompson is utterly different to the intrepid Moore, he sees personal safety only in his vast arsenal of weapons, detailed extensively in Kingdom of Fear.
Anyone who has seen Bowling for Columbine could not fail to notice that Moore's attitude is somewhat different.
While Thompson is revered for his outspoken rudeness and, most notably, for being the only man in print to call George W. Bush a "whore-beast," he is, simultaneously, selling out to a cause with which he seems to be at odds, in return for continuing interest in his work.
In fact Thompson has begun to look like a malignant boil on the arse-end of American gun culture.
In an autobiography full of objectionable details, Hunter Thompson's view of himself is probably the most nauseating. "Every culture needs an Outlaw god of some kind, and maybe this time around I'm it," we are informed, while being simultaneously taunted with the information that 'some are not made for the outlaw life.'
In the face of his demise in popularity, the author's own inflated self-opinion has clearly risen to reactionary, epic proportions.
29th Apr 2004