A High Wind in Jamaica

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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.

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