Fun Perspective Shift -- First Author on Topic? [T]

books:


	• A High Wind in Jamaica (New York Review Books Classics) Richard Hughes NYRB Classics, 1999 - 296 pages average customer review:based on 40 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Fun Perspective Shift -- First Author on Topic? [T]

Sometimes you pick up a book you knew little about, pour through its pages, and think that somewhere, somehow, you had read this book before or one which was so similar. This is one such book.

Ensconced with the unique perspective of children -- ages 3 to 12 -- required to fend for themselves, the plot of this novel seeks to prove to the reader that children can be perceived as midgets or miniature adults. They can take much better care of themselves than we would ever imagine. They are equally capable of great adventure.

This book involves children who are intertwined with pirates. This 1929 novel and "Peter Pan" (1902) have something in common. But, this is not comical. This is a serious novel on a very parallel set of facts. The oldest -- a girl (Wendy?) -- down to the youngest must find a way to overcome the pirates or at least survive capture by pirates. They do.

This book deals with children on the open sea with wild tigers. This 1929 novel and "The Life of Pi" (2001) have something in common. This book involves horrid acts committed before the eyes of the children. Something this 1929 novel and "The Painter Bird" (1965) have in common. And, the children make it through their adventure, in spite of being part of and being witness to man's inhumanity to man. Something this 1929 novel and "Pi", "Painted Bird" and "Peter Pan" also allow.

And there are the trifles and quarrels between the youth. Something this 1929 novel and allegorical "Lord of the Flies" (1954) have in common.

This book has either directly or indirectly influenced so many other great novels which delve into the complexities of youthful interaction with adults. And, to make the novel more complex, it defies all stereotypes. The pirates are humane, not Peter Pan goofballs or Treasure Island's irreproachable characters of improper breeding and education. The children are perceptive and observant, not lumps on logs whose wide-eyed impressions fail to reduce to logic who they are with and how to make the best of the extremely bad situation they are placed in.

In the end, adults of the community can only perceive the pirates as bad, and the children as innocent. But, little Rachel has some evil in her that rivals Hollywood's "Little Chucky." And, those who are around the impish tyrannical child, know not to defy her mandate nor tread near her, for something may happen to them which the pirates themselves would (did) abhor and decry as beyond the pirate's oath.

Hughes' 1929 writing style is different than most anything I have read of this period. It is sharp, it is confined, and it is without excess. Hughes's topic as well as his style are what make this book so wonderfully different and enjoyable. After reading this, I think I will soon reread Golding, or others who I believe were influenced by this classic.

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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 eye-opening. 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 had a wonderful birthday exploring the island, meeting a group of indigenous people and receiving their good faith gifts. But just a few days later, Margaret Fernandez, a neighbor, a bit older then Emily, announces that she can smell an earthquake. Thus the trouble is ushered in as the children cartwheel across the rumbling ground, and their pet, a feral cat, is pursued by predators through the Bas-Thornton house and into the jungle where its otherworldly yowls punctuate the night.

Soon afterward the Bas-Thornton's decide to ship their five children back to England. From this point in the novel, things go terribly wrong as the young troupe is mistakenly kidnapped by a hapless band of Caribbean pirates. Hughes's quirky writing style enhances the dream-like quality of the narrative: seemingly important characters die without the bat of an eyelash, good seems bad, and right seems wrong from the vertiginous heights of the reader's crow's nest.

From the primitive wilderness of the Caribbean Islands to the hyper-civilized atmosphere of an English Central Criminal Courtroom, the novel follows a logical if allegorical arc; but does Hughes mean to describe this arc as progressive or regressive?

A High Wind in Jamaica is one of those books that lulls the reader into a long and languorous torpor. Then it shakes you, slaps you and says "snap out of it".

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An Amazing Book!

I almost didn't read this book when it was compared to Lord of the Flies, but I found it to be more like Animal Farm myself. Maybe I read too much into it, but I thought the opening sentence, "One of the fruits of Emancipation in the West Indian islands is the number of ruins..." set an interesting tone of the obstacles of emancipation whether in children, slaves, or through revolutions. There are scenes where the church's good intentions lead to death, scenes where assumed loyalties mean next to nothing, scenes of people (or causes) overly impressed with their own importance, scenes where pigs (governments?) are referred to such as, "You would never have thought that the immobile mask of a pig could wear a look of such astonishment..." and (also refering to a pig) "When Destiny knocks the first nail in the coffin of a tyrant, it is seldom long before she knocks the last", and scenes towards the end where history is conveniently rewritten. It interesting to me that this book was written in the 1920s -- maybe it was a stretch of my imagination, but I could see a lot of Russian revolution in the book. That is not the amazing part though, the amzing part is that so many take-overs, wars, conflicts, and liberations since seem to have followed (and continue to follow) similar patterns as those of the children in the book. Anyway, enjoy! It kept me interested while making me think!

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A High Wind in Jamaica

I found this book sort of a cross between Treasure Island and Huckleberry Finn, the former because the plot concerns children in the hands of pirates; but the style is more humorous and sophisticated, reminding me a bit of Twain, though more cynical, almost like Lord of the Flies. The first quarter of the novel covers the lives of the Thornton children in Jamaica in the mid-nineteenth cetury; it's this part that reminds me of Twain's writing and is about as interesting. Then the children set sail for England and are kidnapped by pirates, and suspense builds through the rest of the novel, along with a good deal of humor, some cynical, and some mildly shocking. The children, unsupervised, appear to be turning more evil than their pirate hosts. Unusual and amusing events described are just surprising enough to ring true. The author proposes that children are a different animal than people, an idea that was explored further in Mimsy Were the Borogoves, by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore (filmed as The Last Mimzy).

I recently saw the film version of A High Wind in Jamaica starring Anthony Quinn and James Coburn; in a literal sense it follows the novel reasonably well, but as is always the case in adaptations the viewer can't experience the depth of the narrative, and some of the characters are not even established, let alone developed. However, there is a line at the end of the film that helps drive the point home, when a cab driver ironically tells Mr. Thornton that he must be proud of his children.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

Richard Hughes's celebrated short novel is a masterpiece of concentrated narrative. Its dreamlike action begins among the decayed plantation houses and overwhelming natural abundance of late nineteenth-century Jamaica, before moving out onto the high seas, as Hughes tells the story of a group of children thrown upon the mercy of a crew of down-at-the-heel pirates. A tale of seduction and betrayal, of accommodation and manipulation, of weird humor and unforeseen violence, this classic of twentieth-century literature is above all an extraordinary reckoning with the secret reasons and otherworldly realities of childhood.

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