Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson

The appeal of Fear and Loathing rests our culture’s idealisation of the self-destructive, as well as the love of mischief and the ability to outwit others. A mostly autobiographical novel with only a few concessions to the conventions of fiction, the book is entertaining not because of its story – two men go to Las Vegas under the most tenuous of professional pretences and take copious amounts of drugs – but because of the anti-heroic figures at its centre, and the style of writing, mixing together vulgarity and poetic grace in a manner that seems directly proportional to its narrator’s view of the world around him, and the way the drugs alter his perception.

Drugs make Duke and Gonzo horrible social misfits and, on occasion, violent sociopaths who go around committing fraud and screwing with people’s heads, but at the same time they’re enjoying themselves immensely, doing very stupid things and casting their own dark shadow across the vulgar schmaltz that is the American Dream. ‘Duke’ is a clever and eloquent man, quick-thinking and able to reflect on the zeitgeist of his time with a cutting perspicacity that can turn on a dime from scathing to wistful. But while we might like him for his wit, what really appeals about Fear and Loathing is laughing at his misadventures, and his ability to spin a great anecdote.

It’s interesting seeing how many us-and-them divisions Thompson sets up – he’s a ‘freak’, a ‘geek’, totally outside the social norms of the time. He looks down on the man who sees him having his jacket licked in a public toilet and will spend his whole life wondering what he’s missing, and on the hapless policemen, and happily puts himself above other drug users with tales of his Herculean consumption rates. And yet there’s a vulnerability, a stark depiction of his inability to understand the things that are going on around him, or find fulfilment in life, that acts as a counterweight. He’s a coward, running from the realities of his life, but he’s a clever man, and fully aware of the reality of his situation, which is why he is admirable while repulsive, incapacitated but never incapable.