A High Wind in Jamaica (Vintage Hughes)

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Perhaps the gleam of hope, however twisted, is due in part that the pirate Captain Jonsen and his mate Otto are adults and complicated in very different ways from the Bas-Thornton children whose adventures and trials drive the book’s primary narrative. When adults an author presents are simultaneously culpable and vulnerable, it may be harder to make the children formulaic. Of course, this novel originally appeared in 1929, so it may be closer kin to the children in The Turn of the Screw than to Twilight. The current revival of A High Wind in Jamaica encourages me to believe that we haven’t devolved to a state in which all novels about young people have to be market-driven absurdities in which every character (usually with some werewolf, Pekinese or waffle iron lurking inside) acts and thinks like a pre-teen in a cell phone commercial or a day-trading infant. We had a snow storm that lasted 36 hours or so. While the wind howled outside, I sat by the fireplace with this book all day yesterday. I grabbed it again this morning and, funny thing, the storm let down about the time I finished it this afternoon. Now I don’t know if the storm was so bad as I recall it, or it was this disturbing story that made everything look so dark and disquieting for the past 2 days. Not a breath of breeze even yet ruffled the water: yet momentarily it trembled of its own accord, shattering the reflections: then was glassy again. On that the children held their breath, waiting for it to happen. I had watched this eons ago on Italian TV but had long forgotten it - the film does come across as somewhat unmemorable at the end of the day, but this offbeat pirate-adventure-with-child-interest has a beguiling charm all its own. That said, the film's very low-key nature might not win it much approval among action-film fans...

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.'" The novel presents these idiosyncratic and imaginative children first in the lush and exotic tropics, shaken by earthquakes, threatened by a hurricane, surrounded by servants and serpents and clueless English adults. They operate almost as a cult with its own system of taboos and holies, and the genius loci is a fierce cat named Tabby, assailed by wilder beings during a lightning fusillade, and who screeches about “with a tone of voice the children had never heard before and which made their blood run cold.” This is where Hughes goes over the top, as he often does, with language which still never quite loses its voltage and prevents the reader from believing this is an adventure story of the usual sort: “He seemed like one inspired in the presence of Death, he had gone utterly Delphic: and without in the passage Hell’s pandemonium ruled terrifically.” Not easy going, this syntax, but it serves as a reminder that the children have something of the demonic about them. The braid of innocence and wiliness have much to do with the flavor of this novel in which the pirate crew and the gaggle (or perhaps “pride”) of children alternate between peaceful playfulness and terrorizing one another. I first saw "A High Wind in Jamaica" in the late sixties one evening on late night TV. It's a compelling, realistic, well-filmed action movie with outstanding performances by Anthony Quinn and James Coburn and a fast-paced, exciting storyline. It even features a brief appearance by Gert Frobe, of "Goldfinger" fame.

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Published in 1928, the book received strong reactions due to its subject and characters. Nowadays, I am sure sensitive parents will react the same (that is, if they find the time to read). That’s why this is such a good book. It was fascinating to read how easily children adapt to something or the environment, the right and wrong concepts. Moreover, it was absurdly enlightening for me to see how “bad” a child could be in its most natural form. It has a significant impact on my decision not to have any children, and I love it a lot. 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 received much criticism for its content at the time of release. Many critics [ who?] responded negatively to the behaviour and treatment of the children in the novel, ranging from sexual abuse to murder. [ citation needed] After all, a criminal lawyer is not concerned with facts. He is concerned with probabilities. It is the novelist who is concerned with facts, whose job it is to say what a particular man did do on a particular occasion: the lawyer does not, cannot be expected to go further than show what the ordinary man would be most likely to do under presumed circumstances."

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Harold Cohen: "The Drama Desk: Addenda,'" The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (Tuesday, 23 October 1943), p. 24 At the end of the first paragraph of the introduction by Francine Prose is Indeed it recalls much about childhood that we thought (or might have wished) we had forgotten, while it labors with sly intelligence to dismantle the moral constructs that our adult selves have so painstakingly assembled. No, it doesn't recall anything of my childhood, nor does it dismantle any moral constructs. I don't even know what she's talking about. I didn't read any more of the introduction because she started telling me what the story was about, rather than letting me read it, and I expected spoilers. Why do publishers allow this type of introduction?

Anthony Quinn is the captain of a pirate ship in the middle 1600s. The ship and its crew loot a British passenger ship. Half a dozen young kids, mostly British, board the victim ship accidentally sail away aboard the pirate ship. Quinn, a drunken and pediculous lout, comes eventually to care about the children in his own crude way, before a British Naval steamship capture him and his superstitious crew and rescue the kids, who are by this time wearing tattered clothing and are filthy. Once aboard the steamer, the children are delighted with the boat's luxury and the loving treatment by the passengers, who know of the story of the children told by Captain Marpole.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. Beginning this tale of adventure rising out of a tropical fever-dream, I somewhat baffled by Hughes' take on his child-cast, and by why exactly he wanted to write about them so oddly. But really, his portrayal is only odd by comparison to more usual treatments. Hughes actually understands exactly what children are like, and exactly how difficult they are to understand by normal adult interpretations. His entirely unsentimental portrayal is as brisk and funny as it is disconcerting, and both of these sides feel nothing but excruciatingly accurate. It's really quite remarkable that people can live with them around (children, that is). But then, perhaps the irrational and occult world of childhood has its benefits over a rationalized adult world that does such as this: 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. 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

Gossip of the Book World," Los Angeles Times (6 April 1930), p. B16. "'The Innocent Voyage' by Richard Hughes has just been republished by Harpers under the English title, 'A High Wind in Jamaica.' When it was published here last year it had only a small sale, while the English edition, brought out three months ago, achieved an im-..." July, 2011] I have just begun reading New Yorker critic James Wood's wonderful handbook, How Fiction Works, and so am particularly attuned to questions of narrative voice: who is telling the story, with whose thoughts, and for what audience? A perfect focus for Richard Hughes' 1929 novel, a subversive masterpiece of apparently straightforward narrative used for disturbing ends. 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.The slapdash extemporised off the cuff fumbling and wambling way Richard Hughes leads us through this very morally dodgy story is delicious. You never know when another bit of casual violence will sandbag you or if he’ll just tell you about three-year-old Laura’s dolls made of bits of rope. He was omnipresent: the faeries were more localized, living in a small hole in the hill guarded by two dagger-plants. 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. 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. Or consider this passage. The children, on a visit to a neighboring plantation, are swimming in a lagoon. It is heavy, close, and suddenly very still: