A High Wind in Jamaica (Vintage Hughes)

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Subconsciously, too, everyone recognizes that they are animals--why else do people always laugh when a baby does some action resembling a human, as they would at a praying mantis? If the baby was only a less-developed man, there would be nothing funny in it, surely. Hughes has constructed this tale to tell the reader how the inner world of children is so immensely different from the outer world of adult reality. Now this is a novel, so we needn’t worry about whether this insight about child psychology is correct or not. To me it seems awfully persuasive. Over and over he relates an event in the normal way of describing it – then continues, “but to the children …”, and describes how they, or each of them in turn, interprets what they have seen and heard as something that an adult would dismiss as stupid, or fantastical. Deeply bizarre and sometimes hilarious...particularly diverting is the sly narrative voice, which keeps darting around and sneaking up on you. It's the perfect intellectual seafaring adventure.

Many readers will be familiar with the film version of A High Wind in Jamaica, which has its own virtues and shortcomings, simplifying the mysteries of dream and fever by presenting a superstitious crew always fearful that duppies from the dead will curse them. Anthony Quinn, perhaps channeling Zorba, makes for an intriguing rogue captain, but it’s not enough to make up for the loss of Emily’s consciousness, which creates most of the tone and texture of the novel – alternately hallucinogenic and rational, especially with its nautical riches. Then a close friend, the writer Daniel Handler, handed me Richard Hughes' 1929 novel A High Wind in Jamaica, which had recently (and beautifully) been republished by The New York Review of Books.What this book witnesses about decaying imperialism and the parallel decline of a certain brand of outlawry is mostly implicit, but delegates from the Wordsworth and Rousseau schools of natural childhood should beware. Though the narrator cites, and seems to concur with, Southey in his description of psychology as “the Art Bablative,” the novel is rife with invitations to unriddle the knots of personality amid the deceptions, inventions and misunderstandings that create a weather more discernible than typhoons and sweaty, becalmed nights on the bowsprit. Richard Arthur Warren Hughes OBE (19 April 1900 – 28 April 1976) was a British writer of poems, short stories, novels and plays. He was born in Weybridge, Surrey. His father was Arthur Hughes, a civil servant, and his mother Louisa Grace Warren who had been brought up in the West Indies in Jamaica. He was educated first at Charterhouse School and graduated from Oriel College, Oxford in 1922. A Charterhouse schoolmaster had sent Hughes’s first published work to the magazine The Spectator in 1917. The book opens on the island of Jamaica, in the early to mid-1800s, introducing readers to the Bas-Thornton children - in particular John and Emily. The setting is Edenic, with the children often going about naked -- being quite comfortable in having gone “native.” They spend their days swimming, climbing trees, and capturing animals. At one point -- morally telling -- the children muse over the fact that “jiggers” (maggots) are “not absolutely unpleasant” and there is now a “sort of thrill” rubbing the skin (like the natives) where their eggs are laid. Kim demişti ya da nereden okudum hatırlayamıyorum, bu kitabın Peter Pan ile Sineklerin Tanrısının bir karışımı olarak kabul edilebileceğini. Evet, kitap bir yanıyla Peter Pan kadar büyülü ve çocuksuyken bir yanıyla Sineklerin Tanrısı kadar vahşi ve acımasız. Kitabı bu tuhaf karışımdan fazlası yapan ise Richard Hughes'un okuru hem alabildiğine çocukluğun bilinmeyen derinliklerine daldıran hem de belli mesafede tutan muhteşem tekniği. Bir çocuğun iç çalkantılarını, düşünce şeklini, bilişsel çarpıtmalarını, benmerkezciliğini, yeni yeni keşfettiği vicdanıyla hesaplaşmasını, savunma mekanizmalarını tüm açıklığıyla anlıyor, sınırlı bakış açımızlaysa sezdirilenleri keşfetmeye çalışıyoruz. Arka planda ise sömürgecilik ve Doris Lessing kitaplarından aşina olduğumuz sömürgelerdeki İngilizlerin muhtaçlığı ve sefaleti var. Çok başarılı bir roman. Bu zamana kadar okumadığıma üzüldüm açıkçası. Bunda denizde geçen, denizcilik terimleri içeren kitaplardan kaçmamın da payı var elbet. Neyse ki Jaguar sayesinde bu gözden kaçmış şaheseri okuyabildim. Teşekkürler Jaguar! 5/5

New edition of a classic adventure novel and one of the most startling, highly praised stories in English literature – a brilliant chronicle of two sensitive children’s violent voyage from innocence to experience. Harold Cohen: "The Drama Desk: Addenda,'" The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (Tuesday, 23 October 1943), p. 24Hughes did not publish his next novel for 22 years. A Fox in the Attic was planned as the opening volume of a tetralogy bearing the portentous title “The Human Predicament”. It was an impressive and unusual historical novel, based on lengthy research and chronicling the rise of Nazism. The book had a similar divergence of tone - what Kenneth Allsop called “the sinister and the frolicsome” - that he had employed so brilliantly in A High Wind in Jamaica. But as for Emily, it was too much. The earth quake went completely to her head. She began to dance, hopping laboriously from one foot onto another. John caught the infection. He turned head over heels on the damp sand, over and over in an elliptical course till before he knew it he was in the water, and so giddy as hardly to be able to tell up from down.

The book ends with Emily playing with her schoolmates. She is so similar to them that "only God", but no one else, could tell them apart. 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 This book resists to the very end in giving you the sentimentalism you want, in giving in to your pre-conceived ideas of how things should be. And for that it is pure genius.Changes of all kinds fill the novel. In the first chapter we are introduced to the social and cultural changes that took place in Jamaica during the 19th century. Later we witness the accidental, split-second change from life to death on board the Clorinda, and also, when the ship lands, the apparently magical change of women into men. Then there is a most dramatic change that overtakes everyone at the bazaar on St Lucia after a few gallons of an enticing alcoholic drink called “Hangman’s Blood” has been passed around. To the children, the whole nature of the adults “seemed to be breaking up, like ice melting ... The tone of their voices changed, and they began to talk much slower, to move more slowly and elaborately. The expression of their faces became more candid, and yet more mask-like: hiding less, there was also less to hide.” This 1929 novel is the masterpiece of the British author Richard Hughes (1900-1976). He wrote other works, several of which, like this one, have been reprinted in recent years by NYRB. But High Wind in Jamaica (also called Innocent Voyage) has been rated on GR by more than twenty times the number of readers as any of these other works. I first became aware of the novel forty or fifty years ago, from my old copy of Good Reading, in which it is described as “a revealing study of the separate world of childhood.” Others [ who?] lauded Hughes for contradicting the Victorian romances of childhood by portraying the children without emotional reduction. The book is often given credit for influencing and paving the way for novels such as Lord of the Flies by William Golding. As a novelist, Hughes is a peculiar mixture of craftsman, savant and amateur. He is capable of marvelous, hypnotic prose, but can also write a sentence like this: “But it was not her, it was the meal which raped Jose’s attention.” Even Homer nodded, but details also get tangled, as “the ship’s monkey” becomes the novel’s focus briefly and meets a startling end. Not long afterward another monkey appears, with no introduction or explanation. Most frustrating of all is the inconsistency or narrative voice. Throughout most of the tale, the narrator is allowed access to the minds of the characters, but at some junctures, he (or “it”) confesses in a manner reminiscent of Fielding that a particular motive or outcome is beyond his knowledge or understanding. And yet, the raw power and contained hysteria of the story make these errors forgivable.

The story begins in Jamaica sometime around the middle of the nineteenth century. Slavery having been outlawed in 1838 (the Emancipation), the sugar plantations have crumbled into disuse, and more and more of the buildings associated with them have fallen into ruins. One of the former estates, Ferndale, is now occupied by a British family, the Bas-Thorntons, who have come out from England a few years previously. Early in the novel, the Bas-Thornton children go to spend a few days with the Fernandez children -- Margaret and Harry. It is during this stay the children witness the first of the two natural disasters that open the novel: an earthquake. Hughes’ particular genius is his ability to see --without sentiment - through the eyes of a child. His description of their reaction to the earthquake, in all its disorienting effects, rings true: Frank Swinnerton: "Books: Novel Changes Its Name for British Readers; 'Innocent Voyage' Soon to Be Reprinted," The Chicago Tribune (10 August 1929), p. 6. "The novel by Richard Hughes, published with so much and such welcome success in the United States under the title of The Innocent Voyage, is to be issued in England in the autumn. Its title will be 'High Wind in Jamaica.'"

See also

A hurricane hits Jamaica in 1870. The Thorntons ( Nigel Davenport and Isabel Dean), parents of five children, feel it is time to send them to England for a more civilised upbringing and education. Also, the one comment below is to keep an open mind. So I did, although I'm not sure what it is my mind was to be open to. Perhaps I was to recall the psychology of my childhood. Needless to say, I have very different feelings about this book as a whole than I was led to believe I might have. Even if I were a person who re-reads, this would never make such a list.