Richard Hughes's "A High Wind in Jamaica" and childhood maturity

Richard Hughes: A High Wind in Jamaica

This story, the first novel by Richard Hughes, takes place in the 19th Century, and mixes the diverse subjects of humor, irony, satire, pirates, sexuality and children into a very interesting tale, with many sidebar stories tucked into the main theme.

The first part of the story has an eerily familiar ring and meteorological link with the December, 2004 tsunami-related disaster in Asia. In A High Wind, first there is an earthquake, then hurricane-force winds, followed by torrential rains (although no tidal wave) devastate the island and the British children who lived there are sent to England. However, on the way they are attacked by pirates and unwittingly kidnapped by those pirates. From there, the novel has a definite Lord of the Flies tone to it: the English children actually take over control of much of the activities on board, which is as bizarre a situation as some of the events in Lord of the Flies.

What Hughes has accomplished with the novel is not merely a literary study and psychological examination of how children behave under dire straights, or under stress in any form. Rather, he appears to have spun a very entertaining tale and one that was seemingly enjoyable for him to create. A question comes to mind by the reader at the very beginning: is Hughes actually one of the narrators? There seem to be several voices narrating this story. As the narrator voices change, so does their grasp of various languages.

Meantime, Hughes may indeed be the narrator at the start, and off and on through the novel; and it would seem that he is the opening narrator, because the story begins with the narrator looking down from far above the island of Jamaica, and giving the reader some important historical and geographical information about the island.

The initial narrator zooms slowly down to the island, and puts a spotlight on the Thornton family, including Emily, an eleven-year-old girl of much mystery and maturity (notwithstanding her youthfulness). Once the children are captured by the pirates, they write letters to Mr. And Mrs. Thornton; Emily's letter, surprisingly, discusses the cargo of turtles on the ship the children were on, the Clorinda, which is interesting in terms of what it leaves out about their capture.

The writing of the letter seems to give the impression that she is already quite grown up in terms of being able to handle extremely stressful situations with ease. Mature beyond her years, she becomes an enigma even to the narrator, especially after she murders Captain Vandervoort.

"I can no longer read Emily's deeper thoughts or handle their cords," the narrator writes on page 276. "Henceforth we must be content to surmise." On page 173, Emily offers the readers a chance to surmise as to her sophistication and maturity, as she makes a seemingly profound yet mysterious observation of the Dutch Captain Vandervoort, who is tied up on the floor: "There is something much more frightening about a man who is tied up than a man who is not tied up."

The narrator informs the reader through numerous passages that Emily is not only steeped in a stew of odd and even scary circumstances, because of her age and her level of maturity, but that she is clearly in a transitional time herself. She about to depart from her childhood, but is certainly not fully prepared for adulthood.

Is she a helpless victim of the bizarre circumstances surrounding her, or is she a callus murderer who carried out a killing with ice in her veins? The truth is, she is both victim and killer, and this is part of what makes the novel an interesting read; all children of all ages can show dramatically different sides to their personalities, and this example (through Emily) is apparently a literary exaggeration with a purpose.

The entire novel takes place within the period of twelve months, and during that time Emily goes through three distinct periods: the first is her life on Jamaica and her life on the Clorinda (she is without doubt a child in this time frame); the second is her time on the pirate ship (during which time her emerging puberty causes changes in her mental outlook); and third, is her time back with "civilized" society on the steamer and in London (where she learns to disguise some of her deeper inner thoughts, even to the point of hiding them from her own consciousness).

Emily's older sister, Margaret, 13, though not as pivotal to the plot as Emily, and really not as interesting a character as Emily, nonetheless gives the readers a hint of her sexuality (p. 54) when she notices "How handsome Mr. Thornton looked." Her character certainly must have been provocative to the reader in the 1930s, as a girl of that age on a pirate ship, of all places, following the mate Otto around the ship like a teenager with a crush; and of course she eventually moves into his cabin.

Readers are led to believe that Margaret -- while spending her nights with both the captain and the mate Otto -- only has sexual relations with Otto, and is later to become pregnant. And meanwhile, as clear is it is that Margaret has become sexually involved with a much older man (a pirate, at that), it is also fairly apparent that the author wants sex to be a significant part of this book.

The author obviously wants readers to understand Emily's emergence as a sexual being, and as an erotic object. On pages 135-6, Hughes describes the moment when Emily discovers her "self": "She slipped a shoulder out of the top of her frock: and having peeped in to make sure she really was continuous under her clothes, she shrugged it up to touch her cheek. The contact of her face and the warm bare hollow of her shoulder gave her a comfortable thrill, as if it was the caress of some kind friend ... "

In conclusion, what stands out in this book, among many very interesting stories within the whole story, is the way in which the narrator ducks in and out of seeming to be knowledgeable regarding what Emily's thoughts are, albeit from time-to-time seems to be fully inside Emily's vivid mind. For example, after the children are rescued and on board the steamer ship, on page 236, Emily has become fascinated with the stewardess, who has substantial breasts: "Was it conceivable that she [Emily] would herself ever grow breasts like that -- beautiful, mountainous breasts, that had to be cased in sort of a cornucopia? Or even firm little apples, like Margaret's?"

All in all, Hughes has written an entertaining, fascinating novel, and the literary style he employs -- which allows the reader to follow Emily's passage from childhood to a kind of self-conscious early adulthood -- is both enjoyable and educational as well.

Evelyn Waugh -- A Handful of Dust

Evelyn Waugh's novel is set in England in 1934, between WWI and WWII. The novel tells the story of very nice gentleman, Tony Last, who is an aristocrat, and who owns a Victorian country house, gothic style, called Hetton. Tony becomes very aggravated by his wife's infatuation for a young British socialite named John Beaver. Tony's wife is Lady Brenda, who is a cheating, lying, petty woman, who, by contrast, makes Tony seem like something near a saint, albeit he is pathetically naive in many ways.

Tony and Brenda's life is very much the life of leisure enjoyed by the very wealthy; they attend social events and go hunting, and life is good for both of them until John Beaver comes into the picture. Beaver has expensive tastes, but lives on modest income, and so he is quite enamored with the fact that Brenda (very wealthy of course), an older woman, takes an interest in him.

Brenda habitually lies to Tony -- and one of his biggest mistakes in this novel is trusting her, believing in her despite her selfishness and bad behavior -- and in fact she takes a modest apartment in London in order to carry on a sexual affair with Beaver. She tells Tony that the reason she needs to have an apartment in London is that she's decided to take up the study of economics -- and for the time being, he believes her; he busies himself in the country in his home, while she has a good time playing with her boyfriend in the city.

Tony, who resists getting angry throughout the novel until Brenda asks for a divorce, and expects to support Beaver on alimony from her husband; moreover, she expects that he will sell the estate he dearly loves (Hetton) in order for her to carry on her absurd romance with a much younger man, Beaver. And there is a very cold scene in the book, when Tony and Brenda's son, John Andrew, is tragically killed while hunting; Brenda abandons her husband and her family, for the young socialite, in fact she leaves for the weekend (and Beaver's arms) right at the time of her son's untimely passing

And so Tony takes a long trip to Brazil, and while traveling up the Amazon River, he becomes sick, and his friend, Dr. Messinger, drowns. Just about the time Tony is about to die in Brazil, he is rescued by a strange and very eccentric recluse named "Mr. Todd"; this recluse, who has apparently lived in the jungle (away from society) for 60 years, loves to have the works of Charles Dickens read to him, and this becomes Tony's life.

There are indications that this story was Waugh's way of condemning British society, that the trusting Tony reflects the "old" British society, who takes his wife's word that she is up to only honorable things, and the affair Brenda has with Beaver is the "new" British society, a lying, cheating society capable of infidelity and cruelty. This "new" British society was also capable of cold-hearted behavior, such as Brenda showed when she dealing with her son's death; on page 167, Brenda said "I suppose there'll have to be a funeral," which is first of all, an odd thing to say, living in England at this time in history -- "Well, of course," Tony replies -- and second of all, an indication that getting back to her hot young lover meant more to Brenda than saying goodbye to her dead son, properly and with dignity.

Even Brenda's "dear john" letter to Tony (172), which he finds after she has left for London instead of attending the funeral, is ice cold: "I am in love with John Beaver and I want to have a divorce and marry him," Brenda writes. "Please do not mind too much ... [and] I hope afterwards we shall be great friends."

Tony Best, meantime, is the most believable, likeable, and interesting character in this novel. Readers might find though, that his pathetic and bumbling behavior with regards to his wife's affair with a young man -- and indeed, his failed marriage -- casts some shadows on his character. The narrator (page 135) offers a glimpse of Tony's struggle with reality, and paint a picture of a man befuddled, confused, and unable to get a grip on why these unpleasant things have happened to him.

"He could not prevent himself, when alone, from rehearsing over and over in his mind all that had happened since Beaver's visit to Hetton," Waugh writes. "Searching for clues he had missed at the time; wondering where something he had said or done might have changed the course of events; going back further to his earliest acquaintance with Brenda to find indications that should have made him more ready to understand the change that had come over her, reliving scene after scene in the last eight years of his life."

This is a fruitless struggle that Tony has embarked upon; and his bitter, bleak struggle to get away from all the pain of his failed marriage and his son's demise, are presented through Waugh's descriptive narrative on board the ship that is taking Tony to Brazil (222). He looked out over the Atlantic Ocean and saw " ... ponderous waves rising over murky, opaque depths. Dappled with foam at the crests, like downland where on the high, exposed places, snow has survived the thaw." Indeed Tony's life had become "murky" and "opaque"; the sky overhead was "lead-gray and slate," "olive, field-blue and khaki like the uniforms of a battlefield." His life had become a battlefield, and he had lost the war. On page 277, Tony, who has fallen ill in Brazil, is "weak and dizzy," and his fever created "a constant company of phantoms" which "perplexed his senses." Certainly Tony's life had been joined by a "company of phantoms" long before he went to Brazil, and prior to him becoming sick; but he didn't know about those "phantoms" (his wife's infidelity and her lover) then, and didn't need to know about them now, but his reality was greater than his will to escape his past, or to make him well for the future.

Virginia Woolf -- Between the Acts

Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts was set during mid-June, 1939, just as the hatred and loathing in Europe was leading up and gearing up (instigated by Adolf Hitler) to what would inevitably become WWII. And in the novel, set in an English village, war was imminent, as well; it is clear that Woolf was concerned about how war would affect the small villages on the homefront. Three things about Virginia Woolf and the writing of her novel are worth mentioning at the outset of this review of Between the Acts.

One, she began writing the novel as a way to address questions of English history and English literature; her original title was "Pointz Hall," but as war emerged, it became a novel related to the real life happenings of that period.

Two, she wrote the novel through the evacuation of British troops from Dunkirk (May, 1940), through the Battle of Britain and the London Blitz, but the villagers seemed less concerned with the conflict raging in Europe, than with whether the pageant would be called off on account of rainy weather or other eventualities. She was clearly playing journalist, and expressing her own feelings about the way Britons were situating militarism -- on the other side of the English Channel, and out of mind when possible.

Three, she was a troubled person, and obviously made even more troubled by the brutal war unfolding at her doorstep; when she took her own life (drowned herself) in March, 1941, the manuscript was complete, though historians believe she may have made some revisions in the book had she lived. Meanwhile, her husband, Leonard Woolf, contracted to have the book published in 1941, as the war raged and readers everywhere wondered why a brilliant writer like Virginia Woolf would take her own life.

Notwithstanding the war, and Woolf's troubled emotional state, the novel, like other Woolf novels, is brilliant and fascinating in the sense of the many voices she uses, the linguistic richness she employs. Even birds, like the nightingale (page 3), play an important part in creating a Woolf-impassioned tone: "Not to the nightingale, the amorous, the expressive, do we turn [in this crisis;] praying to be released from the herring and the council houses, for they sing of death, the nightingales."

Rather than the nightingale, Woolf turns to "some little anonymous bird of daylight ... A sociable fowl; who, shuffled in the angle of the apple tree, can't sleep." So the nightingale isn't acceptable because he sings of death; but an "anonymous" little bird, a "senseless and ironic bird," like "a child asking to be let down from the high chair" can "tweak us awake" and remind us "of the [cold] under our feet; [of our nakedness] ... while our tongues shape the smoke in our brains into talk about herring and cesspools."

The story takes place over a 24-hour period of time -- as villagers make preparations for the pageant -- which is quite a difficult and challenging feat for a writer to do, and do well, given the condensed window of time in the lives of the characters. The house in the novel, "Pointz Hall," is inhabited by the Olivers -- Bartholomew Oliver, his son Giles and Giles' wife Isa (who loves Rupert Haines), and Bartholomew's sister Lucy Swithin. In order to make a point about progress, and history, Woolf writes the opening conversation at Pointz Hall in order to present the theme of running water coming to the village for the first time, and the fact that many villagers are having bathrooms constructed into their homes.

Woolf's characters talk a lot about history, about prehistoric England, the scars on the Olivers' land (made by the Romans), and the ancient pond (juxtaposed with the new bungalows popping up around the town). Meanwhile, the director of the pageant, Miss La Trobe, seems to be trying to bring the audience together, as perhaps Woolf herself was during this awful scourge of war she was living through. But, hard as Miss La Trobe tries, the gramophone keeps repeating, "dispersed are we."

Miss La Trobe becomes a central character, though she is the artist outsider, and as a lesbian, she is pretty much marginalized from the village. And as if to justify that community reticence towards Miss La Trobe, she, Miss La Trobe has created her own version of British history, which leaves gaping holes in British history. So, maybe what Woolf was doing through these characters was showing how villagers in the late 1930s were in fact ignoring the history (Hitler's war on Europe) raging right at their doorstep.

Woolf did not overuse military allusions, but the novel has plenty of military references, which of course, for a reader in 2005, is helpful in setting the theme and tone. On page 53 of "The Later Typescript," "Miss La Trobe was pacing to and fro between two leaning birch trees ... she had the look of a commander pacing his deck." Even the trees "with black bracelets circling the silver bark" were about "a ship's length" away; and Miss La Trobe shaded her eyes "in the attitude proper to an Admiral pacing his quarter-deck." An admiral's image would fit La Trobe, since, on page 53, they called her "bossy."

And maybe, when Rev. Streatfield tried, at the end of the event, to give a summation for the pageant -- and was interrupted by the loud road of airplanes overhead -- that was Woolf's way of showing that though villagers wished to ignore the onrushing war, they ultimately couldn't ignore it. And also, to sum up the novel in the context of Woolf's life and of WWII, the pageant itself is a kind of condensed history of the literature of England -- and what Woolf was doing was showing, through her characters and narrative, how people tend to fold present day realities into our view of history, like folding a pound of yeast into a tub of bread dough, giving rise to the end result.

Jean Rhys -- Voyage in the Dark

This was the third published novel by Jean Rhys, and the setting is 1914; it is told in four parts by a teen-age West Indian chorus girl (who is white-skinned), named Anna Morgan. It is worthy to note that Rhys grew up in the Caribbean, and she in fact opens her novel with her narrator describing the radical difference between her life in Dominica, and England:

'It was as if a curtain had fallen, hiding everything I had ever known. It was almost like being born again. The colours were different, the smells different, the feelings things gave you deep down in yourself was different." And those differences were not just in cold and hot, or darkness and light; rather, it was "a difference in the way I was frightened and the way I was happy."

And as her narrator, Anna, moves around England, which, compared with Dominica, is gray, chilly, and bleak, she interrupts the storyline to flash back to her life in the warm Caribbean climate. Clearly, like Rhys herself, the narrator misses the warmth and vitality of her original homeland. And when Anna meets up with an older man, Walter Jeffries -- who has wealth and connections -- she tries to show him what it was like back there in the comfortable, warm climate of Dominica, but he cares little about her roots, and cares a lot about getting her into bed. That fact is a shame, because by this point in the novel, Anna has become dependent on Walter, both for money, and for emotional stability.

On page 54-55, it's obvious Walter really doesn't care much for anything Anna has to say, but he sure cares about the sensual pleasure she brings him. "My father was a fine man,' I said, feeling rather drunk ... "

"I disliked my father,' Walter said. 'I thought most people did.'

"Oh, I didn't mine,' I said ... 'I'm a real West Indian,' I kept saying. 'I'm the fifth generation on my mother's side.'

"I know, my sweet,' Walter said. 'you told me that before.'

"I don't care,' I said, 'It was a lovely place.'

"Everybody thinks the place where he was born is lovely,' Walter said.

"Well, they aren't all lovely,' I said 'He got up and pulled me up and started kissing me. 'You sound a bit tight,' he said. 'Well, let's go upstairs, you rum child, you rum little devil ....Champagne and whisky is a great mixture,' he said. We went upstairs."

The first portion of the novel ends with Walter cutting off their relationship; as to where she would go now that she and Walter were no longer an item, on page 100 a reader gets a clear idea of her loneliness: "I walked straight ahead. I thought, 'Anywhere will do, so long as it's somewhere that nobody knows'."

Part two of the novel offers descriptive narrative about the indigenous peoples of Dominica, the Caribs. Anna remembers "their resistance to white domination ... was fierce," which perhaps is more than a subtle hint that her resistance to Walter's domination should have been a bit more intense. But during this part of the novel, Anna becomes a heavy drinker, and in part three, she continues to become a hardened boozer, and moves from one short-lived relationship after another. She is short of money, a sad drunk, and pregnant.

In part four, this sad tale of a young woman out of her comfort zone (Dominica) continues as Anna endures a brutally crude abortion, after which, in Rhys's original version of the novel, Anna dies. But when the final section was re-written, apparently Rhys' editor encouraged her to allow Anna to survive. The doctor (187) tells Anna, after the abortion, that she'll be "ready to start all over again in no time, I've no doubt."

At the beginning of part four (183), Anna had seen a "long yellow ray coming in under the door from the light in the passage. I lay and watched it. I thought, 'I'm glad it happened when nobody was here because I hate people.'"

And at the conclusion of part four, after the doctor had pronounced she was ready to start over, and the "voices stopped," that same "ray of light came in again under the door like the last thrust of remembering before everything is blotted out" (188).

She lay and watched the ray of light, "and thought about starting all over again. And about being new and fresh." She also thought about "mornings, and misty days, when anything might happen. And about starting all over again, all over again ... "

As a writer who is gifted at shaping interesting literary technique, Rhys also can be rather ordinary and obvious in her tone-setting, such as the "ray of light" under the door during Anna's horrifying abortion experience. Is the "ray of light" a "ray of hope" for a better future? Maybe. But this novel leaves the impression that Rhys is pointing out the plight (perhaps of the immigrant woman) that many women go through at a young age in a mean adult world.

She floats from relationship to relationship, and each time she has an affair with another man, her sense of values is diminished. She becomes worn out, poor, homeless, desperate, and like a heroin addict needs another fix, she needs another man who will let her stay with him -- but who will take advantage of her in the meantime.

It's a depressing tale, and one of male arrogance towards a vulnerable young woman; and albeit these characters are not men who rape her, they do treat her with contempt.