The 1p Book Review – Richard Hughes: A High Wind in Jamaica

 A High Wind in Jamaica should be far more well-known and well-discussed than it is. This is one of those ‘where have you been all my life?’ novels. I picked it (a 1974 Penguin Modern Classics edition) from my bookshelf the other week on a whim – it must have been languishing there for some time as I have no memory of acquiring it – and it turned out to be the best book for adults about children I have ever read.

Anyway, in the first chapters we enter a swoony, semi-surreal evocation of a colonial Jamaican childhood in the late 19th Century. We meet, in a passing, oblique sort of way, the five young Bas-Thornton children as they explore the duppy-haunted jungle and swim in water-holes. One day a severe hurricane spooks their parents, prompting them to send the children  to the ‘safety’ of England, and so off they sail on the barque Clorinda.

There then follows a plot device – delivered in the form of a letter to the Bas-Thornton parents – so utterly shocking that, even though it comes only a fifth of the way through the book, I don’t want to spoil it. This makes it rather tricky to review A High Wind in Jamaica, as for maximum impact it would be good if you could approach it as I did: knowing nothing about the story. But what I can tell you is that it is as true and unflinching a look at childhood as you’ll ever encounter.

Scouring online, Hughes is cited as a major influence on  Lord of the Flies. But Golding’s book feels like an allegory: a brilliantly-constructed but nonetheless contrived set-piece. A High Wind (available for a penny here) gives us an almost equally unlikely scenario, but delivers it in such a way that it is impossible not to believe in it, at least in terms of its psychological truth. Hughes tell us what it is to think like a child; and the first and most important thing about that is that children do not think like adults. It is not that children don’t rationalise things – they do, all the time – but that they are much more adaptable to the arbitrariness of life’s twists and turns; and they are, in a non-trite sense, amoral.

Being nearly four years old, she was certainly a child: and children are human (if one allows the term “human” a wide sense): but she had not altogether ceased to be a baby: and babies of course are not human—they are animals, and have a very ancient and ramified culture, as cats have, and fishes, and even snakes: the same in kind as these, but much more complicated and vivid, since babies are, after all, one of the most developed species of the lower vertebrates.

In short, babies have minds which work in terms and categories of their own which cannot be translated into the terms and categories of the human mind.

It is true they look human—but not so human, to be quite fair, as many monkeys.

Subconsciously, too, every one recognizes they are animals—why else do people always laugh when a baby does some action resembling the 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.

Possibly a case might be made out that children are not human either: but I should not accept it. Agreed that their minds are not just more ignorant and stupider than ours, but differ in kind of thinking (are mad, in fact): but one can, by an effort of will and imagination, think like a child, at least in a partial degree—and even if one’s success is infinitesimal it invalidates the case: while one can no more think like a baby, in the smallest respect, than one can think like a bee.

How then can one begin to describe the inside of Laura, where the child-mind lived in the midst of the familiar relics of the baby-mind, like a Fascist in Rome?

Hughes wrote A High Wind in 1921 and only three other novels; a crying shame as he’s a prose master able, like T H White, to break the rules. We get occasional first-person authorial intrusions as in the above (atypical) passage, but they work. (I wonder if this influenced Martin Amis’ much less subtle use of the technique – the young Amis appeared as one of the children in a 1965 film adaptation of A High Wind.) There is plenty of comedy: we are lulled by laughs into a sense of cosiness, so that the jabs of cruelty, when they come, they are all the sharper.

Anyway, I risk giving too much away if I say more. Admittedly this hampers this review’s value as a guide to the book – but The 1p Book Review is primarily about rediscovering neglected gems rather than analysing them, so you should go and buy A High Wind in Jamaica now. Prepare to be blown away.

Do you want to recommend a book that can be bought for a penny online? Email your nomination and review to editorial@thedabbler.co.uk
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12 thoughts on “The 1p Book Review – Richard Hughes: A High Wind in Jamaica

  1. Worm
    February 28, 2011 at 13:04

    I am currently reading it – still in the hallucinatory early jungle stage, looking forward to how it’s going to unfold!

  2. Gaw
    February 28, 2011 at 13:32

    Any thoughts as to why it has been neglected along presumably with Hughes’s other books?

  3. Brit
    February 28, 2011 at 13:38

    I’ve been pondering that and suspect there are multiple factors, including the general problem that there are just too many books in the world. It was considered a ‘modern classic’ in 1974 anyway, and Hughes had a very big reputation before falling out of circulation.

    My best theory is that Lord of the Flies occupies the same space in the school curriculum and in the sociological/psychological parts of popular culture, and offers a much simpler analysis than A High Wind.

  4. jonhotten@aol.com'
    February 28, 2011 at 19:55

    Could it also be a title thing? It’s not a great one – it almost borders on bodice ripper territory. Lord Of The Flies is, apart from anything else, a brilliant title. It’s intriguing, where high Wind isn’t.

    Have never read it, but think I will now…

  5. andrewnixon@blueyonder.co.uk'
    February 28, 2011 at 20:15

    Something in that, Jon – certainly might help explain why I didn’t pick it off the shelf for so long, anyway. As a title ‘Lord of the Flies’ is up there with Catch-22 and A Clockwork Orange…

  6. maureen.nixon@btinternet.com'
    February 28, 2011 at 23:53

    I had a brilliant teacher for O and A level English in the 1960s. Lord of the Flies was a set text for O level but she gave us A High Wind in Jamaica to read alongside it. Your description of the difference between the two books is exactly what we were led to see in our inspiring lessons.

    • andrewnixon@blueyonder.co.uk'
      March 1, 2011 at 08:53

      I think, in a nutshell that Lord of the Flies’ characters all represent a different element of human nature, the sum of which is meant to reveal a truth, whereas Hughes’ children just are true.

  7. alasguinns@me.com'
    Hey Skipper
    March 1, 2011 at 02:36

    Or I could buy it for the Kindle at $10.

    Which, considering how well your PG Wodehouse recommendation has turned out, I just did.

    Hughes can’t be too neglected, there are plenty of books that haven’t been Kindled.

  8. mail@danielkalder.com'
    March 1, 2011 at 05:09

    NYRB Classics in the US brought out a really nice edition a few years back. Been sitting on my shelf for a while, and I feel the urge to read it.

  9. andrewnixon@blueyonder.co.uk'
    March 1, 2011 at 08:54

    Skip and Daniel – that’s heartening (that it’s on Kindle and still in print). Maybe he’s maintained a higher profile in the US.

  10. Gaw
    March 5, 2011 at 20:23

    Michael Holroyd pushes a revival in today’s Guardian:

    The book I most often give as a present is A High Wind in Jamaica, by Richard Hughes (Vintage Classics). A superficial reason is that, owing to a generous moment of confusion by Royal Mail, I have several copies in a handsome Folio Society edition. But the real reason is that I consider it a much-overlooked and undervalued novel, inappropriately eclipsed perhaps by William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. On one level it’s an exciting adventure story with great storms and earthquakes, terrific animals, unruly children and some dubious pirates. What more, when young, could you want? But all this coexists with another narrative, darker and more sophisticated, complex and tragic. You can read this book over again and have read a different novel.

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/mar/04/best-world-books-night-presents

  11. rosie@rosiebell.co.uk'
    March 6, 2011 at 14:11

    I haven’t read A High Wind since I was a teenager, but I have a memory of dreamy surrealism and the children in their own world, unable to react to things like grown ups, or how they think they should react to them. I remember one thing – that though they said they loved their parents, they really loved the cat more. I’ll re-read it.

    Lord of the Flies is perfect classroom material. It’s really easy to write an essay about it as the themes are so obvious. My take on it is that it doesn’t tell you that much about the darkness at the heart of mankind since it deals with an unusual social set up, not like a tribe at all where there would be elders and of course women. It does tell you about the darkness at the heart of the English public school system – a much told tale.

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