A High Wind in Jamaica (Hardcover)

About all I can say positively for it is that it's an easy read and flows by rather swiftly. My main quibble is with Hughes' overly febrile imagination. It definitely gets the better of him after the children are pirated away off the Cuban coast. Hughes' depiction of Emily's sexual awakening borders on the disquieting. She's only ten years old, after all. The even yonger Rachel has her upturned bottom smilingly explored by the pirate captain while she is sleeping in a scene closer to De Sade than to Golding. Such scenes are passed off as innocent encounters, yet the underlying tension is not so easily dismissed. Freudians would no doubt have a field day with this novel.

I enjoy dark satire and psychological exploration in novels. I suppose one can approach the novel from that perspective, but I can only say I've seen it done much more adroitly than Hughes manages here. He depicts the psychology, without any motivation behind it. That is a fatal flaw for a writer. The overly eccentric children's behavior is entirely enigmatic and uncontrolled, which reflects a rather Hobbsian or Calvinist world view. These are definitely not Rousseau's noble savages prancing about the yardarms. They are feral little time bombs, wreaking bloodshed and misery on the adults who intend them no harm. In that sense, they are indeed like Golding's barbaric little band of boys. They have no internal moral compass, no code of behavior, save what is expedient for them.

Even that wouldn't be so bad, if the satire were fleshed out with a bit more more humor, a la Swift. Though some readers found humor in the novel, I just couldn't fathom where. At its core, it's one of the most cynical works I've ever read. It's the novelistic equivalent of reading Juvenal or Rochester, sans the great wit that underscored their satirical poems. Suffice it to say that I won't be including it on my personal list of 100 top novels of the 20th c.

BEK

It is difficult to sum up exactly what is going on throughout the book, event leading to action leading to betrayal leading to another fun game. In the end the book might even be read as a comedy--that of a pessimist attacking both human nature and the world--and I must admit that throughout several of the more harrowing scenes I found myself laughing in self-defense.

Great, great stuff, beautifully written and compelling. I wouldn't presume to guess how any one individual might take it and that, to me, the unexpectedness of the whole thing, is what constitutes some of the greatest masterpieces. Very highly recommended--