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A High Wind in Jamaica
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Amazon.com Review
A High Wind in Jamaica is not so much a book as a curious object, like a piece of driftwood torqued into an alarming shape from years at sea. And like driftwood, it seems not to have been made, exactly, but simply to have come into being, so perfectly is its form married to its content. The five Bas-Thornton children must leave their parents in Jamaica after a terrible hurricane blows down their family home. Accompanied by their Creole friends, the Fernandez children, they board a ship that is almost immediately set upon by pirates. The children take to corsair life coolly and matter-of-factly; just as coolly do they commit horrible deeds, and have horrible deeds visited upon them. First published in 1929, A High Wind in Jamaica has been compared to Lord of the Flies in its unflinching portrayal of innocence corrupted, but Richard Hughes is the supreme ironist William Golding never was. He possesses the ability to be one moment thoroughly inside a character's head, and the next outside of it altogether, hilariously commenting. 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
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"This brilliant, gorgeously written, highly entertaining, and apparently light-hearted idyll quickly reveals its true nature as a powerful and profoundly disquieting meditation on the meaning of loyalty and betrayal, innocence and corruption, truth and deception." — Francine Prose, Elle"During one snowy day, I read the whole book in one gulp. It was remarkable, tiny, crazy. I felt just like I did as a kid." — Andrew Sean Greer, All Things Considered, NPR “A surprisingly terrifying short novel about children kidnapped by pirates, elevated from its silliness by surprising moments of violence and introspection, as well as repeated flourishes of literary brilliance. Also, it’s funny.” —Emily Temple, Lit Hub, "20 Short Novels to Stay Up All Night Reading""A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes is like those books you used to read under the covers with a flashlight, only infinitely more delicious and macabre."— Andrew Sean Greer, All Things Considered, NPR“Cross a wacky seafaring adventure--Conrad gone awry via inept piracy--with an exploration of the consciousness of a child as radical and insightful as that provided by Henry James in What Maisie Knew, and you have A High Wind In Jamaica by Richard Hughes....By turns funny, ironic, and brutally sad, this is a complex and astonishing novel."—Sue Miller, Barnes and Noble Review
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Product details
Paperback: 279 pages
Publisher: New York Review Books (1928)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0940322153
ISBN-13: 978-0940322158
Product Dimensions:
5 x 0.7 x 8 inches
Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
3.9 out of 5 stars
95 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#45,033 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
This little book exceeded my expectations and made me wonder how many other books, unsung or forgotten, are living out there on library shelves. The New York Review of books has opened a door into this lost world of words. This is the second book I have recently read from the NYRB collection. If you've grown tired of hunting for good reads in recently published fiction you might be interested in their selections.A High Wind in Jamaica describes children and their thinking as they actually might be. When one is too young to understand the workings of the adult world, one actually has a strange advantage. The action takes place in the mid-19th century. Briefly and without spoilers, seven children are sent by their parents from Jamaica to England to attend school. Early on, their ship is seized by pirates, the children with it. This is when the fun begins.If you have a fixed image of pirates and one of children as well, A High Wind in Jamaica will forever change that. As a retired teacher, I have been very aware of what children are capable of, both good and bad. Richard Hughes provides a playing field where all manner of fantastic adventure can take place. This book is compared to Lord of the a Flies, but I don't see the similarity other than both books focus on the actions and perceptions of children freed from the safety and care of responsible adults. It is all a little weird and horrifying. By all means read this book.
"A High Wind in Jamaica" is always on the "best novels" lists and when I finally got around to it, I've discovered that the adulation is deserved. It's one of the best things I've read for a long time. "A High Wind..." is sometimes compared to "Lord of the Flies," but they can teach "Lord of the Flies" in high school because the symbolism is pretty clear and the little-nerdy-guys vs big-peer-pressure-bullies characters are easy to point out and discuss. And there's no sex in "Lord of the Flies." (How could there be? It's all boys?!?) The plot of "A High Wind..." is high adventure: After a hurricane destroys the house of the British colonialists exploiting the poor in Jamaica, the Bas-Thorntons send their five slightly wild children (oldest brother John, followed by Emily, Edward, Rachel, and baby Laura) - along with the Fernandez's slightly older and more reserved children (Margaret and Henry) - back to Britain. But on the way back, they're kidnapped by pirates and undergo a number of extraordinary physical and psychological adventures before they're returned to the motherland.The violence in "A High Wind..." is pervasive and clearly important to the plot. Like the violence, the sex is scattered throughout the story, but appears ambiguous. But if you think about it, the sexual allusions result in inappropriate sex; some dirty filthy, socially unacceptable sex WITH PIRATES; a little sexual confusion among the children; and even a some gender play WITH PIRATES, all of which could be tough to talk about with tenth graders.The first half of the novel has plenty of funny, dry British incidents. The diction itself is often intentionally humorous. The pirates turn out not to be what you might expect, which is both funny and appalling at times. And the conclusion is completely ambiguous, ending in a very thought-provoking scene. This is a terrific novel that shouldn't be wasted on the young who wouldn't understand all the implications.
High-seas piracy and the complex psychological lives of children are brought together, quite strikingly, in Richard Hughes’s 1929 novel "A High Wind in Jamaica." This book looks ahead to William Golding’s "Lord of the Flies" in the way it suggests that the outward innocence of children may conceal a capacity for cruel and wicked acts; but Hughes’s presentation of these ideas seems to work at a subtler and more disturbing level than does Golding’s better-known 1954 novel."A High Wind in Jamaica" begins in, unsurprisingly, Jamaica, at a time when that singularly lovely island is still an English colony. I took this book along with me on a trip to Jamaica, and I found that the descriptive passages from the early part of the book capture well the paradoxical beauty of the island: “The air was full of the usual tropic din: mosquitoes humming, cicalas trilling, bull-frogs twanging like guitars. That din goes on all night and all day almost: is more insistent, more memorable than the heat itself, even, or the number of things that bite†(p. 18). The evocation of natural beauty, closing on a note of menace: it is strongly characteristic of the manner in which Hughes conveys setting and tells his story.The “high wind†of the novel’s title is a hurricane that strikes Jamaica and destroys the home of the Bas-Thorntons, an English family who, like many other Britons of that time, have come to Jamaica to recoup fortunes lost in the mother country. Struck by how narrowly the family survived the tempest that destroyed the family home, and concerned that their proper English children seem to be taking on “wild†island ways, Mr. and Mrs. Thornton decide that it is a propitious time to send their children to live in England, along with the children of a nearby Creole family.Yet Hughes’s narrator places considerable emphasis on the idea that the Thorntons – and, by implication, most parents – know almost nothing about the actual emotional lives of their children, in passages like this one:“It would have surprised Mrs. Thornton very much to have been told that hitherto she had meant practically nothing to her children….[I]t would undoubtedly have surprised the children also to be told how little their parents meant to them. Children seldom have any power of quantitative self-analysis: whatever the facts, they believe as an article of faith that they love Father and Mother first and equally. Actually, the Thornton children had loved Tabby [the family cat] first and foremost in all the world, some of each other second, and hardly noticed their mother’s existence more than once a week. Their father they loved a little more: partly owing to the ceremony of riding home on his stirrups.†(pp. 44-45)But the Clorinda, the ship in which the Thorntons have booked passage “home†to England for their children, is waylaid by pirates; and once the children have been taken onto the pirate ship, Hughes gets on to his real subject: the question of what children – especially the two oldest Thornton children, John and Emily – are capable of, once the restraints of ordinary civilization have been stripped away.The children-and-pirates scenario may seem like something reminiscent of J.M. Barrie’s "Peter Pan" (1904); but if anything, "A High Wind in Jamaica" works as a sort of anti-"Peter Pan." For one thing, the pirates, as led by a Danish captain named Jonsen and his Viennese first mate Otto, are not figures of operatic menace, like Captain Hook from Peter Pan or Long John Silver from Robert Louis Stevenson’s "Treasure Island" (1883); rather, they emerge as feckless and rather pathetic figures. Taking advantage of the indulgent attitudes of Spanish colonial authorities in the port of Santa Lucia, Cuba, they are operating a good 150 years after the supposed “golden age†of piracy: “Piracy had long ceased to pay, and should have been scrapped years ago; but a vocational tradition will last on a long time after it has ceased to be economic, in a decadent form. Now, Santa Lucia – and piracy – continued to exist as they always had: but for no other reason†(p. 96). And as their nautical misadventures unfold, Jonsen and Otto and the rest of the pirates show a remarkable capacity for poor and ill-informed decision-making. The more fateful, and more existentially troubling, words and actions and decisions come from the children."A High Wind in Jamaica" offers a couple of real surprises. When, for example, one major character leaves the novel, the circumstances of said event are described so routinely – in a single, declarative, 24-word sentence, about one-third of the way through the book – that the reader is likely to flip through the next couple of pages in search of a passage saying “It was only a dream†or “It was not as serious as had been expectedâ€; but no such passage is to be found. Comparably surprising is an action that Emily carries out after Captain Jonsen’s pirate ship has captured a Dutch merchantman.Hughes is one of those early-20th-century British modernists whose literary consciousness seems to have been molded in large part by the devastation of the First World War. His narrator sets forth the events of "A High Wind in Jamaica" with a knowing, rueful outlook on human flaws and failings, occasionally moving from the novel’s characteristic third-person omniscient point of view to passages of first-person narration in which the narrator stresses what he does not know – as when the narrator says of Mrs. Thornton that “She was a dumpy little woman – Cornish, I believe†(p. 44).This work reminded me of the novels of Robert Graves and Malcolm Lowry, fellow Britons who lived and wrote during the same period; and if you like books like Graves’s World War I memoir "Good-Bye to All That" (1929) or Lowry’s novel "Under the Volcano" (1947), then "A High Wind in Jamaica" will probably appeal to you as well.
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