After a terrible hurricane levels their Jam aican estate, the Bas-Thorntons decide to send their children back to the safety and comfort of England. On the way their ship is set upon by pirates, and the children are accidentally transferred to the pirate vessel. Jonsen, the well-meaning pirate c aptain, doesn't know how to dispose of his new cargo, while the children adjust with surprising ease to their new life. As this strange company drifts around the Caribbean, events turn more frightening, and the pirates find themselves increasing ly incriminated by the children's fates. The most shocking betrayal, however, will o nly take place after the return to civilization.
The swift, almost hallucinatory action of Hughes's novel, together with its provocat ive insight into the psychology of children, made it a bestseller when it was first published in 1929 and have since established it as a classic of twentieth-century li terature--an unequalled exploration of the nature, and limits, of innocence.
One of the Modern Library's 100 Best Novels of the Twentieth Century
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
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 4.5 / 5.0
"Children find amusement even in discomfort...":
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... more info
Luminously True Classic of Childhood:
Everyone on earth ought to read this book, even if we have to translate it into Malagasy and Mordvinian. It is supremely excellent for several reasons. It portrays children, their thoughts, their world with its textures, imaginings and fears, in a way so accurate, honest and vivid that you notice at once that almost all other fictional treatments of children are nonsense by comparison.
It shows us everything else from the same child's-eye viewpoint, bringing unequalled freshness and strangeness,... more info
A reread, 60 years later.:
Can you imagine a book that reminds one of The Ransom of Red Chief; Treasure Island; The Clockwork Orange; and The Lord of the Flies, at the same time? High adventure, in which a group of children are captured by pirates, leading to a voyage in which the "innocent" victims conquer and destroy their nefarious captors. In the process, one is forced to examine all your assumptions about the nature of good and evil. A forgotten masterpiece.
Riding The Torrent:
Richard Hughes's 1929 odyssey, A High Wind In Jamaica -- which has been included in the Modern Library's List of "The 100 best English-language novels of the century"--forces the reader to revisit that moment when children lose their innocence to the world; that diaphanous transference from childhood to adulthood that can be so heartbreakingly revelatory. In this tale, it rides in on a torrent of bad weather seemingly induced by an earthquake. Emily Bas-Thornton has just turned ten in Jamaica and has... more info
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