A High Wind in Jamaica (New York Review Books Classics)

Irony finds a happy home indeed in the book's mixture of the macabre and the adorable. The baby girl, Rachel, "could even sum up maternal feelings for a marline-spike, and would sit up aloft rocking it in her arms and crooning. The sailors avoided walking underneath: for such an infant, if dropped from a height, will find its way through the thickest skull (an accident which sometimes befalls unpopular captains)." In that "such an infant" lies a world of mordant wit. In fact, throughout, Hughes's wildly eccentric punctuation and startling syntax make just the right verbal vehicle for this dark-hearted pirate story for grownups.

Hughes enjoys some coy riffing on the child mind, as with this description of the way Emily handles an uncomfortable social situation: "Much the best way of escaping from an embarrassing rencontre, when to walk away would be an impossible strain on the nerves, is to retire in a series of somersaults. Emily immediately started turning head over heels up the deck." Even so, Hughes never sentimentalizes his subject: "Babies of course are not human--they are animals, and have a very ancient and ramified culture, as cats have, and fishes, and even snakes." Children, as a race, are given rough treatment: "their minds are not just more ignorant and stupider than ours, but differ in kind of thinking (are mad, in fact)." That madness is here isolated, prodded, and poked to chilling effect. But Hughes never loses sight of his ultimate objective: A High Wind in Jamaica is, above all, a cracking good yarn. --Claire Dederer

Product Description
Richard Hughes's celebrated short novel is a masterpiece of concentrated narrative. Its dreamlike action begins among the decayed plantation houses and overwhelming natural abundance of late nineteenth-century Jamaica, before moving out onto the high seas, as Hughes tells the story of a group of children thrown upon the mercy of a crew of down-at-the-heel pirates. A tale of seduction and betrayal, of accommodation and manipulation, of weird humor and unforeseen violence, this classic of twentieth-century literature is above all an extraordinary reckoning with the secret reasons and otherworldly realities of childhood.

About all I can say positively for it is that it's an easy read and flows by rather swiftly. My main quibble is with Hughes' overly febrile imagination. It definitely gets the better of him after the children are pirated away off the Cuban coast. Hughes' depiction of Emily's sexual awakening borders on the disquieting. She's only ten years old, after all. The even yonger Rachel has her upturned bottom smilingly explored by the pirate captain while she is sleeping in a scene closer to De Sade than to Golding. Such scenes are passed off as innocent encounters, yet the underlying tension is not so easily dismissed. Freudians would no doubt have a field day with this novel.

I enjoy dark satire and psychological exploration in novels. I suppose one can approach the novel from that perspective, but I can only say I've seen it done much more adroitly than Hughes manages here. He depicts the psychology, without any motivation behind it. That is a fatal flaw for a writer. The overly eccentric children's behavior is entirely enigmatic and uncontrolled, which reflects a rather Hobbsian or Calvinist world view. These are definitely not Rousseau's noble savages prancing about the yardarms. They are feral little time bombs, wreaking bloodshed and misery on the adults who intend them no harm. In that sense, they are indeed like Golding's barbaric little band of boys. They have no internal moral compass, no code of behavior, save what is expedient for them.

Even that wouldn't be so bad, if the satire were fleshed out with a bit more more humor, a la Swift. Though some readers found humor in the novel, I just couldn't fathom where. At its core, it's one of the most cynical works I've ever read. It's the novelistic equivalent of reading Juvenal or Rochester, sans the great wit that underscored their satirical poems. Suffice it to say that I won't be including it on my personal list of 100 top novels of the 20th c.

BEK


One of the greatest novels I've ever read   October 31, 2003
bensmomma (Ann Arbor, Michigan)
22 out of 24 found this review helpful

On its surface, Hughes' High Wind in Jamaica is the story of two families of young cchildren, sent home to England by their parents following a cataclysmic hurricane that levels their plantation in Jamaica. Subsequently the children are kidnapped by pirates; the book follows their story until their eventual return to England. The pirates turn out to be, for the most part, well-intended and even protective of the children, but by the end of the story the same cannot really be said of the children themselves, whose behavior at points seems threatening and malevolent by comparison to their captors.

Others have made a comparison between this book and "Lord of the Flies," both because of their stories of children torn apart from the moorings of civilization, and for their undercurrent emotion of malevolence, darkness, and evil. To my mind, Hughes' intent is broader than that, and I actually prefer "High Wind" to its rival. Hughes is also exploring a more general theme of alienation and the kind of moral emptiness that accompanies it: child vs. adult, plantation owners vs. slaves, the wild of Jamaica vs. the civilized form of the British Empire, each unknowing and thus cruel to the other.

The ending is actually shocking, a perfect end to this highly unconventional but perfectly-pitched book. One of my "best ever" novels.


merciless   December 21, 2003
asphlex (Philadelphia, PA USA)
15 out of 16 found this review helpful

This is a wonderful book. Short, swift and very bloody, Hughes tells a story of children as seperate from adult human nature and explores the ways in which children can cope with danger and catastrophe in the light of the usual adult nervous fumbling. It is a psychological portrait, but is so much more as well. An exciting action-adventure; an epic on nature and the sea; a ruthless story of pirates in the age of their decline; a terrifying masterwork detailing the lies all people must tell themselves in order to survive.

It is difficult to sum up exactly what is going on throughout the book, event leading to action leading to betrayal leading to another fun game. In the end the book might even be read as a comedy--that of a pessimist attacking both human nature and the world--and I must admit that throughout several of the more harrowing scenes I found myself laughing in self-defense.

Great, great stuff, beautifully written and compelling. I wouldn't presume to guess how any one individual might take it and that, to me, the unexpectedness of the whole thing, is what constitutes some of the greatest masterpieces. Very highly recommended--


Hard to review   April 15, 2002
Walter Sobchak (Los Angeles, CA)
13 out of 25 found this review helpful

I know there is a cult for the works of Richard Hughes, so what I have to say probably won't be well accepted. But after all the hype I heard about "A High Wind in Jamaica" I'd be lying if I said I wasn't disappointed.
The opening part of the novel, which is the best part of the story in my opinion, takes place in Jamaica. I get goosebumps thinking how vividly Hughes portrays nature here. Nature is violent, indifferent, and ruthless. We are also introduced to the Thorntorn family. After a devastating hurricane that totals their home, the parents decide to send their five children back to England, where they will receive their education. The vessel they are taking back to England is intercepted by pirates, and the children are abducted by them. There is your plot.
I wonder if Hughes was a social or child psychologist in his day because he seemed immoderately concerned with the development of the children - and that is the main weakness of the book for two reasons. #1 I don't think his characterizations were very realistic at all. The children were stoic and heartless - similar to how Hughes depicted nature. #2 I think his preoccupation with the psyche of the children detracted from the story itself. Several times I said to myself, "This isn't a case study on Emily! The plot needs to move too!" With the exception of the descriptions of the boat and the sea, the novel could have just as easily took place on Mars if Hughes would have substituted the appropriate setting.
Then, all of the sudden, Huges decides to end the story for no particular reason. I guess he felt he did enough exploring of the nature of children. As a consolation prize, the ending was consistent with how everything that happened up to that point.
Go ahead and read "A High Wind in Jamaica" because it is definitely a different reading experience. But other than the memorable, exotic, and mysterious descriptions of nature, I did not extract much joy from it.


In a Looking Glass, Darkly   June 11, 2002
sweetmolly (RICHMOND, VA USA)
12 out of 16 found this review helpful

This darkly humorous, gently ironic story is first and foremost a spellbinder. Told in an informal understated fashion; it is a tale of great events and awe-inspiring violence both by man and nature.

The Bas-Thorntons, an English family with five children, eke out a living in mid-nineteenth century Jamaica. (Father is handsome, but not a money maker.) The children have an enchanted existence in this lush, tropical, faintly oppressive island. They are busy from sunup to sundown with their own ideas of play, investigation and pretend. Their lives are changed when a devastating hurricane demolishes their home, killing one of the Negro servants, and their half-wild cat, Tabbie. The children are quite calm during the ferocious storm and interestingly are far more desolate about the loss of their cat than the human being who died before their eyes.

The parents decide the children must go back to safe Mother England to better structure their lives. Most ships were still under sail at this time, and the children are quite excited at the prospect of magical England. Mrs. Thornton worries that the children will pine endlessly at being separated from her, but in actuality, they are quite indifferent. They have no sooner set sail than they are set upon by some of the most inefficient pirates that ever graced that notorious profession. After a few weeks on shipboard with the pirates, the children are thriving, and the pirates are not. Two deaths, one an accident and the other murder occur though the pirates are relatively innocent of both. After the rescue, the pirates are tried, found guilty, and hanged.

The children endure great hardships and shocking sights, and the reader is taxed again and again with the merciless survivability of small children. They resolutely see what they want to see, and believe the adults if it is convenient, but most of the time just plain do not care. Usually, they have other fish to fry. The author is careful with his characterizations treating the well-meaning mother and the individual pirates with same merciless clarity as he does the children. This is truly a classic, and I believe every parent who reads it will have an uneasy feeling of humility at the close of the book. Read and enjoy. Read it to your children and be ready for them to laugh in all the wrong places.