The best first line I have ever read was “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold” and it comes from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. As first lines go, it’s pretty close to perfect. At once it tells you that you’re not in Kansas anymore and that you’re in the company of people who are not averse to amending their personal reality with chemicals.

If you haven’t read any Hunter S. Thompson, you should. He’s the father of Gonzo, the school of journalism that places the reporter at the heart of the story and does away with objectivity. Anthony Bourdain did something similar with the occasionally award winning TV series “No Reservations”, and really, it’s the only approach that makes sense. If you think about it, journalism often tries for objectivity (which it can’t ever really achieve, because let’s face it, we’re all human and no human in a situation can pretend to be outside it) and then needs a Human Interest story to bring home the impact of that objective situation. Thompson cuts through that by covering the story from his point of view. Sometimes he becomes the story.

I came to this book while he was still alive, having read a lot of “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail” during a stay in hospital. It was only an overnight and there was nothing else to read on the ward. Unwilling to sleep, knowing the staff would be around every couple of hours to take stats, I kept myself awake with page after page of American election coverage from the 1970s. All of it gloriously alien, America being a curiously sanitised place that only existed on television. American TV couldn’t mention toilets (British TV seldom passed that opportunity by) but here was a writer who understood viscera.

Picking up “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” and reading that first line, I knew I was in for a ride. I was not disappointed. It could be a Western. Seriously. Two guys ride into town, stir up the locals, defy the law and end up running for the state line in a dust cloud of indignation, fear and crazed laughter. Or, as Thompson himself says, it could be a search for the American dream. I tried that myself, but discovered that the standard dream is, in the end, unsatisfying. The dream moves on, as dreams do, and part of America dreams about frontiers and pushing on into new ground where you can carve out a life for yourself and on your own terms. It’s why no one ever wrote anything like “Fear and Loathing in Blackpool”. Books like this can only happen in America. Nowhere else has the same mix of limitless possibility and bleak disappointment, which by some alchemy got embodied in Las Vegas.

There’s no point talking about whether a book is objectively good or bad. There’s no point in trying to assign any kind of rating system to something as personal as a reading experience. Hunter S. Thompson demonstrated that you could create an incredibly powerful experience (I need never take any one of the drugs he mentions in the course of the book, for example, because he took them instead and told me how that feels) by speaking directly to your audience, by assuming they get you and are as smart as you. This isn’t always a safe assumption, but it’s a good place to start. The author’s voice is strong, strident, affecting. Coming out of this book, I found myself talking and thinking like the narrator.

Writers imitate one another. We all go through phases of reading something that speaks to us and then trying – consciously or otherwise – to write in that voice or style. It’s an impossible task. I could no more successfully imitate Hunter S. Thompson than I could P.G. Wodehouse. Trying to, on the other hand, teaches you things about your own voice. It’s a lesson in authenticity. If I look back at my personal slush pile, there are stories in it where I clearly want to be Hunter S. Thompson. They’ll never see the light of day because of how badly that failed. Nevertheless, this column wouldn’t be happening this way if I hadn’t got to the end of a review, bashed out in fairly anodyne prose, and heard an angry voice telling me to damn well get in there and cover the story.

The Brew: Hunter S. Thompson famously favoured Rum, as do I.

The beer I’d pair with this book is Guinness Golden Ale. It’s another in their recent line of “experimental” brews, and a good addition too.

The beer isn’t golden. It’s more a sort of deep bronze colour, so it looks like it should be bitter and heavy. It isn’t. For a beer that looks heavy, it’s pleasantly and surprisingly light. It’s a beer you can sink half of to take the edge off a thirst. There’s some malt and a few hops at the end for what the label hopes is “floral”, but what I’d say was crisp, clean and delicious. I sank a bottle and wanted more.

Why pair it with this book? Because you’ll want a drink that you can enjoy. You’ll want to get the dust off your tongue, but you’ll want something to amuse your senses too. Something to unjade you and wake you back up.

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Born in England, David Webb tried to identify his ancestral roots by having his DNA tested. The lab results came back accompanied by a note reading simply “oh dear.”

He lives somewhere in the middle of England, where his tendency for sarcasm and his crippling addiction to tea pass without comment by the general population. He likes reading and writing, history, science fiction and things that are silly, neatly combining all of these by venerating (as all Brits surely do) Doctor Who.

He recently acquired a Bowler hat and is not afraid to wear it in public. You can find more of his writing here.