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Richard Hughes

A High Wind in Jamaica

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….

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 have no idea who their offspring are, or about the steamy, highly charged dramas that they are secretly enacting. “This sort of life was very peaceful, and might be excellent for nervy children like John; but a child like Emily, thought Mrs. Thornton, who is far from nervy, really needs some sort of stimulus and excitement, or there is a danger of her mind going to sleep altogether for ever. This life was too vegetable. ” It takes a typhoon blowing the roof off the family house — an event upstaged for the children by Tabby’s murder by a pack of wild cats amidst thunder and lightning — before the grown-up Thorntons decide that the island life really is unsuitable, and send their brood off to Britain on the Clorinda .