A High Wind

 “A High Wind In Jamaica” by Richard Hughes.  Holy cow.  I want to write about generational otherness, like that.  I want to dignify the complexity of childhood and the proximity of childhood and primacy of that time in that way.  What lovely little children.  They are raised properly, if coldly, newly there on a late nineteenth century plantation in Jamaica.  That setting, necessarily charmed and painful is explained with excruciating clarity through the eyes of these young English children.  Life is ferocious for all the animals they see it is ferocious for the African descendants who live in the hut out back and eventually for them, themselves, with the hurricane hits. 

They have parents who orchestrate good hygiene and good manners and good prayers, but err towards good-riddance as it concerns their children.  “Go out side and play.”  And we all have little difficulty imagining that prim and distant sort of proper upbringing.  Later when these same children are kidnapped and the guidelines of their worlds completely dissolve we appreciate how genuine each child’s would view is.  How they amalgamated new morals and new norms to cognate the remarkable and unpleasant things they were now living with as normal.

Most of the children begin to loose their mind in one way or another, adopting random new norms and reference points to guide their rationale.  In a manner admirable I think for anyone who reads it, the children shed their Victorian polish and use it as fertilizer as they try on new identities: as big people, as unwanted, as adventurers, as sexual objects.  I was reminded of “The Man Without Qualities” by Robert Musill where Walter’s wife Clarisse has a descent into insanity so plausible and well rendered that there is danger in joining her there as you proceed on her angular path, page after page. 

  

Searching up info on the book I noticed that there was a movie of it made in the Fifties with Anthony Quinn.  Reading up it appears that they simplified the plot considerably.  Looking at some of the stills I can almost hear the music they would have played.  Easily conjure the way Anthony Quinn’s eyes would look in some scene where as Jonson, he makes eye contact with Emily.  It struck me quite clear that the book’s magisterial detachment that keeps one hypnotized as a fractured child till the end . . . would have been drowned in Technicolor sentimentality, simplicity.  Shouldn’t be too hard to simply let the children tell their story but it doesn’t appear to be what happened in the screen play

Hughes’ omniscient voice has let’s us in that the prosecuting attorney Mathias is not interested in the facts: 

“After all a criminal lawyer is not concerned with the facts.  He is concerned with probabilities.  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.”

I’ve already sent a copy to a friend through Amazon, here, mid flight.