A High Wind in Jamaica

"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 expected”; 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.

I came to this book with high expectations. It is not only listed amongst the top 100 novels of the 20th c. by the Modern Library, but is also mentioned by Anthony Burgess on his own top 100 novels list. One Amazon reviewer whose literary tastes I admire also heaped praise on it. 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

This review will be short and read about as fast as this excellent book. I'm so glad I found it, late in life as it is - when I can appreciate language and character-study. The other reviews reveal the thread of the story, but none seem to mention Hughes' craft in juxtapoisng the characters with fate. Not their particular fates, fate in the large sense. Mr. Hughes presents situations more comfortable in reality, not fiction - but, of course, that is what good authors delight in. There are children and adults here, but they mix like oil and water. Natural disaster (applied to loss and human suffering), the physical properties of water, wind, and the motion of ships all clash with character options - what we call happenstance. These options prove just as fallable after everyone is safely ashore, where old and young struggle to co-operate in a conclusion to the adventures of chance, which fate controls there as it blindly condemed and saved on the sea. Justice and maturity might be the overriding theme of High Wind in Jamaica - a teriffic novel that shouldn't be compared to Lord of the Flies, which explores another path (absence of adults among boys facing adversity). How Hughes convincingly represents the reasoning of pirates, court officials and children of both sexes is why this novel is a gem.

Another Eng comp reading assignment - but easily liked and read. Following all of the children - but especially the god-monster child, Emily - makes this book so strong and hard to put down. I was in between stories at time - I definitely picked up 'Wizard of Oz' - 'Peter Pan' - moments. Having read Walcott's 'OMEROS' a few years ago - this movement through Jamaica and the Caribbean waters - felt comfortable, wild and familiar. The odd bonding between Emily & Capt. Jonsen is definitely the strongest picture painted in the book - and in several places requires looking back a few pages to catch up to the present. The narrator's switchback style - giving and taking from the characters and stories at whim is also amazing done without interrupting the story. It's the stories close - where the real world pushes back in - and gives all that came before a close. "Once more a phase of their lives was receding into the past, crystallizing into myth." - is the perfect sum of this happy/melancholy tale.

The plot is a child's fantasy gone very wrong: a bunch of British children are accidentally kidnapped by a group of incompetent pirates. But despite the author's often whimsical and gently ironic voice, there's nothing magical about the adventure. Instead, death, violence and imminent danger weave in and out of the story. Its vaguely fantastical atmosphere is enhanced by Hughes's uncanny ability to peer into the heads of small children of varying ages and present exactly what he finds there; these are among the most genuine kids in literature, and their peculiar strength, self-assurance and sheer vapidity endow them with a strange power that they exert on their surroundings. Hughes' prose could have been written with cut glass, it's that sharp. Strange, eerie and beautifully written, this is no Treasure Island or Peter Pan - it's going for far bigger game.

Talk about a snooze fest! Somehow I managed to plod along to the finish line of this tepid tale although I was tempted to walk away three or four times along the journey. A book in which you keep waiting for something to happen, hoping the next page gets the snowball rolling downhill, only to realize as you draw nearer and nearer to the conclusion that the denouement will be as mind numbingly boring as all the pages that preceded it. To suggest that this is one of the 100 best books of the 20th century (chosen by the Modern Library) is a magnitude of hyperbole usually encountered only in automobile advertisements. The author should have been made to walk the plank for this lackluster and wearisome soap opera.

I picked this up after decades of circling it, and after reading it, my head is spinning. There's a lot to like about the book, most especially the almost psychedelic point of view of the children. Emily, the protagonist, is a cryptic, manipulating child, who is described as discovering that she's a person at the age of ten. A little late for that, since she's in the middle of a pirate drama at the time. The children's parents seem generally unconcerned with the kids as humans, so maybe that explains Emily's delayed self-concept. She also seems asocial, maybe even sociopathic, since she doesn't exhibit normal emotions at critical moments. She's more concerned for the life of a pig than for her brother and doesn't seem to connect to her parents at all. The pirates who kidnap the children more or less accidentally are portrayed as somewhat benevolent bumblers, even though molestation and abuse lurk barely below the surface. Emily ultimately turns the tables on all of her adult handlers, but it's unclear to what effect. I have seen this described as a kind of Lord of the Flies on the high seas. The kids described by William Golding were more interesting, and even nicer at some level.