A High Wind in Jamaica (Vintage Hughes)

Product Information

I had watched this eons ago on Italian TV but had long forgotten it - the film does come across as somewhat unmemorable at the end of the day, but this offbeat pirate-adventure-with-child-interest has a beguiling charm all its own. That said, the film's very low-key nature might not win it much approval among action-film fans...

Others [ who?] lauded Hughes for contradicting the Victorian romances of childhood by portraying the children without emotional reduction. The book is often given credit for influencing and paving the way for novels such as Lord of the Flies by William Golding.Deeply bizarre and sometimes hilarious...particularly diverting is the sly narrative voice, which keeps darting around and sneaking up on you. It's the perfect intellectual seafaring adventure. When the ship put into Tampico, where the Captain hoped to leave them behined with the local Madame, played by Lila Kedrova who seemed to have taken acting lessons from Carmen Miranda, the children were spruced up and returned to their clean clothes and with their hair combed. As the crew member doing the grooming explained: "the Captain wants you to look your best for the ladies". "What ladies?" asked the children. Under his breath the seaman muttered "You'll find out." Of course, the local ladies were the ladies of ill repute in a Godforsaken part of the Carribean where anything goes and the law would never set foot.

A High Wind in Jamaica is a 1929 novel by the Welsh writer Richard Hughes, which was made into a film of the same name in 1965. The book was initially titled The Innocent Voyage and published by Harper & Brothers in the spring of that year. Several months later Hughes renamed his novel in time for its British publication, [1] and Harper followed suit. [2] The original title retained some currency, as evidenced by Paul Osborn's 1943 stage adaptation. [3] [4] There have since been two radio adaptations (one written in 1950 by Jane Speed for NBC University Theater; [5] the other in 2000 by Bryony Lavery for BBC Radio 4 [6]), with the title A High Wind in Jamaica. The setting also deserves a comment: although I don’t deny that this story may be historically accurate – I would not doubt that newly freed slaves would not kill their previous masters, be it by starvation or more deliberately feeding them ground glass. Piracy was also probably still very common in the middle of the 19th century. Hangings certainly were, and the inefficiency of the judicial system still is. Hughes’ Jamaica and later London are not the Jamaica and London of this realm, but one from a parallel world, barely more colourful than reality, yet different, more comic or caricature.

Contribute to This Page

There can be little doubt that A High Wind in Jamaica helped change the notion that literary fiction could also be best-selling fiction, but perhaps, more importantly, it changed how children were portrayed within such fiction; we only have to look at the works of Roald Dahl, William Golding, and maybe J.K. Rowling, to understand the point. At the end of the first paragraph of the introduction by Francine Prose is 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. No, it doesn't recall anything of my childhood, nor does it dismantle any moral constructs. I don't even know what she's talking about. I didn't read any more of the introduction because she started telling me what the story was about, rather than letting me read it, and I expected spoilers. Why do publishers allow this type of introduction? The book received much criticism for its content at the time of release. Many critics [ who?] responded negatively to the behaviour and treatment of the children in the novel, ranging from sexual abuse to murder. [ citation needed] A few days later, while browsing through what I bought, I realised that I actually bought a book that I couldn’t find the original if I wanted. I’ve always loved books that came into my life with strange coincidences, and this book was no exception.