A High Wind in Jamaica - Richard Hughes [0]
by Richard Hughes
Flyleaf:
After a terrible hurricane levels their Jamaican 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 captain, 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 increasingly incriminated by the children's fates. The most shocking betrayal, however, will take place only after the return to civilization.
The swift, almost hallucinatory action of Hughes's novel, together with its provocative insight into the psychology of children, made it a best seller when it was first published in 1929 and has since established it as a classic of twentieth-century literature -- an unequaled exploration of the nature, and limits, of innocence.
Copyright 1929 by the Executors of the Estate of Richard Hughes
Introduction Copyright 1999 by Francine Prose
All rights reserved.
Reprinted by arrangement with the Estate of Richard Hughes
First published by Harper and Brothers 1929
This edition published in 1999 in the United States of America by The New York Review of Books, 1755 Broadway, New York, NY 10019, www.nybooks.com
ISBN 0-940322-15-3
INTRODUCTION
First the vague premonitory chill--familiar, seductive, unwelcome--then the syrupy aura coating the visible world, through which its colors and edges appear ever more lurid and sharp. . . The experience of reading Richard Hughes's _A High Wind in Jamaica_ (a book in which swoons and febrile states play a critical role) evokes the somatic sensations of falling ill, as a child. 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.
The book opens among the ruined houses of the West Indies, slave quarters and mansions democratically leveled by "earthquake, fire, rain, and deadlier vegetation," and features a frightening cameo appearance of the Misses Parkers, a pair of bedridden elderly heiresses starved to death by their servants amid ormolu clocks and the bloodied feathers of slaughtered chickens. The scene is grim, fantastical, but the novel's language is delicate and precise--there is a humorous, chirpy cerebration to its narrative voice--and right away we are conscious of, and troubled by, the dissonance between tone and content-- one that turns out, however, to be central to the shocking story Hughes has to tell. For on the surface, _A High Wind in Jamaica_ is an adventure yarn involving five British children captured by a crew of pirates. But underneath this high-spirited romp is a story about murder, senseless violence, gothic sexuality, and capricious betrayal, a narrative that more nearly evokes the pictures of the "outsider" artist Henry Darger than those of, say, Kate Greenaway.
When we first meet the Bas-Thornton family, they are living in Jamaica, where Mr. Thornton is involved in "business of some kind." The children have business of their own, most of it involving the serial cruelty with which they treat the island's hapless indigenous fauna. In this "paradise for English children," John, the eldest son, catches rats for the degustation and sport of Tabby, the family's half-wild pet cat, itself fond of mortal combat with poisonous snakes. Emily, the oldest of three girls, whose deeply peculiar experience and consciousness is at the center of the novel, has a passion for "catching houselizards without their dropping their tails off, which they do when frightened . . . . Her room was full of these and other pets, some alive, others probably dead."
The younger Thorntons' sphere is so distant--so different--from that of their parents that they might as well be feral children. Mr. and Mrs. Thornton