A High Wind in Jamaica - Richard Hughes [2]
If adult sexuality seems unhealthily like a child's, adult morality is hardly more mature or developed. Everyone lies and keeps poisonous secrets, especially the children. ("Grown-ups embark on a life of deception with considerable misgivings, and generally fail. But not so children. A child can hide the most appalling secret without the least effort, and is practically secure against detection.") Everyone, of every age, behaves according to an almost psychotically private and individual set of moral criteria: it's wrong to mention underwear and call adults by their first names but permissible (or hardly worth noting) to lie to God in one's prayers and misdirect a court of law convened to try a capital offense. No one has much of a memory; the children adapt quickly to separation from their parents and recover from the shock of a death among them with alarming ease and flexibility.
By the end of the book, what the children have been told about their ordeal by the adults (who themselves have little or no interest in the truth) has blended with, or replaced, their sense of what really occurred. And when we meet the lawyers directing the trial that occupies the final section of the novel, we realize that these representatives of justice and high civilization--after all that wildness!--are little better than pirates in robes and periwigs. They are men, Hughes slyly informs us, whose interest in the world is the opposite of a writer's: "It is the novelist who is concerned with facts, whose job it is to say what a particular man did do on a particular occasion: the lawyer does not, cannot be expected to go further than to show what the ordinary man would be most likely to do under presumed circumstances."
Unlike William Golding's far more simplistic _The Lord of the Flies_, to which it is sometimes compared, Richard Hughes's novel resists any attempts to extract from it a moral or sociological lesson, a bit of received wisdom or home truth. It's hard, in fact, to think of another fiction so blithe in its refusal to throw us the tiniest crumb of solace or consolation, to present a single character who functions as a lodestar of rectitude or beneficence.
In the end, everything in this luminous, extraordinary novel is so much the reverse of what we think it should be, or what we would expect, that we are left entirely disoriented--unsure of what anything is, or should be. The effect is disturbing and yet beautiful, fantastic but also frighteningly true to life. Published in 1929, just as history was preparing events that would forever revise the terms in which one could talk about innocence and evil, _A High Wind in Jamaica_ is one of those prescient works of art that seems somehow to have caught (on the breeze, as it were) a warning scent of danger and blood-- that is to say, of the future.
--FRANCINE PROSE
A HIGH WIND IN JAMAICA
1
One of the fruits of Emancipation in the West Indian islands is the number of the ruins, either attached to the houses that remain or within a stone's throw of them: ruined slaves' quarters, ruined sugar-grinding houses, ruined boiling houses; often ruined mansions that were too expensive to maintain. Earthquake, fire, rain, and deadlier vegetation, did their work quickly.
One scene is very clear in my mind, in Jamaica. There was a vast stone-built house called Derby Hill (where the Parkers lived). It had been the center of a very prosperous plantation. With Emancipation, like many others, that went _bung_. The sugar buildings fell down. Bush smothered the cane and guinea-grass. The field negroes left their cottages in a body, to be somewhere less disturbed by even the possibility of work. Then the house negroes' quarters burned down, and the three remaining faithful servants occupied the mansion. The two heiresses of all this, the Miss Parkers, grew old; and were by education incapable. And the