A High Wind in Jamaica (Vintage Hughes)

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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. A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes is like those books you used to read under the covers with a flashlight, only infinitely more delicious and macabre.” I saw this movie as a child and it had made such an impact on me that I never forgot it, or the haunting theme song. I'd long since forgotten the title, so I was utterly thrilled when I happened to turn the AMC channel on and they were playing it - 30+ years after it was in theaters! It wasn't until after the two main actors passed away that this movie was FINALLY released to the public - around 40 years AFTER it was made. I do not know if it was due to some rights conflict, or that maybe they didn't want it released due to the original story that dealt with a very 'inappropriate relationship' between the child-character Emily, and the Captain. This relationship is displayed far more subtly in the movie, most likely to make it a bit more family-friendly, however, the book was far from being a family-friendly novel. The book and movie are thankfully and EXTREMELY different in demeanor and focus. The author's focus appeared to be more with a notion of an innate evil within children, where he presents them as being cunning, manipulative, knowledge-filled, demon-like creatures, rather then innocent-minded youths. A couple of examples of the differences in demeanor between the book and the movie; In the book, it is the Captains right-hand man, Zac, who takes the eldest dark-haired girl by brutal force and keeps her as his - uh - female. When she becomes a lifeless, emotionless shell, he simply throws her overboard into the sea. In the movie, it is the girl who takes notice to a crew member and no one is taken by force or repeatedly raped or thrown to the sharks. At the end of the movie, Emily is confused by what occurred on board with the battle they were involved with, where the other ships Captain was murdered in Captain Chavez's quarters, where Emily was. She very innocently, grievously, and mistakenly says something that sends her beloved Captain, and his crew, to the gallows. In the book, she did it on purpose with malicious intent. It's like two completely different stories. In the final scene children play innocently by a lake. Emily stands amongst them—staring at a model ship with adult eyes.

Next, the narrator: he is so funny. He's always coming in at odd times to tell us his opinion, but rarely outright. He's subtle about it. 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. Once, when she was eight, Mrs. Thornton had thought she was too big to bathe naked any more. The only bathing-dress she could rig up was an old cotton night-gown. Emily jumped in as usual: first the balloons of air tipped her upside down, and then the wet cotton wrapped itself round her head and arms and nearly drowned her. After that, decency was let go hang again: it is hardly worth being drowned for—at least, it does not at first sight appear to be.Decency go hang—how great for a child! You would not find such laissez-faire attitudes in genuine Victorian children's literature such as E. Nesbit's The Railway Children, and you certainly don't find it in C. S. Lewis' high-minded The Chronicles of Narnia a quarter century later. But what about that authorial aside, "at first sight"? A warning of more serious trespasses still to come?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. 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.

There is little reason that one can see why it should not have happened to her five years earlier, or even five later; and none, why it should have come that particular afternoon. 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. He was omnipresent: the faeries were more localized, living in a small hole in the hill guarded by two dagger-plants. 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.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. This book does not moralize. It is light reading, but also very heavy if you want to read into it. But most of all, it is light. I've rated this book a five before. Now a decades-later second reading, just finished. I would rate it higher, but I can't find the extra stars. What possible meaning could Emily find in such an eye? Yet she lay there, and stared and stared: and the alligator stared too. If there had been an observer it might have given him a shiver to see them so - well, eye to eye like that. A High Wind in Jamaica was Richard Hughes’s first novel. It was written over a peculiarly anxious and difficult period of his life when he was in his mid-to-late twenties. His engagement to a young poet, Nancy Stallibrass, had been broken off a few days before the date of the wedding, and he suffered a nervous collapse. In his depression he was able to write for not more than “ten minutes at a time” and often found that he could not “write at all for days together”.

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 And so on - with Emily barking like a dog, and John swimming as if going to Cuba. The point here - and throughout the novel - is that from an adult point of view, children are mad. To maintain this psychological high-wire act must be very demanding for a writer. To succeed for the length of a novel is simply a tour-de-force - and Hughes does succeed. 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.

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...