– In which Dorn reads a seafaring yarn.
he Bookshop was on TV this week. It’s a nice little movie about a British widow in the 1950’s who opens a bookshop and runs afoul of the local Powers That Be. At one point she befriends and hires precocious young Christine to help out in the store. While she is trying to interest the rest of the town in Lolita, she gives Christine A High Wind in Jamaica, saying it’s a book about “good pirates and evil children”.
That piqued my curiosity, so I looked around for the book. Not in the local library, and not available in the digital library either (a frequent occurrence with books published before e-books were commonplace). Richard Hughes wrote it in 1929, so it was old enough that it might be available in one of the free digital resources. It wasn’t in Project Gutenburg, but there was a legible copy from the digital library of India in the Internet Archive.
It was a great short summer read, and over too soon. The story is of children sent to England after a hurricane destroys their Jamaica home, who on the voyage are captured by pirates. It’s brimming with playful insights into the minds of children, parents, and pirates. There are a few shocking moments, a few brushes with darker themes, and some casual racism of the kind apparently allowed in the early parts of the 1900’s.
The central theme of the book was the amorality of children, which didn’t really make them evil, just innocent of the whole concept of good and evil. Several of the reviews on Goodreads suggested the story was a mix of Peter Pan and The Lord of the Flies, with perhaps a bit of Heart of Darkness thrown in.
But I found it much lighter reading than that–to me it seemed like a mixture of the satire of Mark Twain with The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place (one of my all-time favorite stories), with a dash of Bonfire of the Vanities sprinkled on top.
In its time, A High Wind in Jamaica was a best-seller, and considered quite controversial and ground-breaking for its unsentimental portrayal of children’s psyches. It made some “best 20th century literature” lists, but I had never heard of it. I’m glad I stumbled on it, though, and I commend it to you. You can get a PDF of it off of the Internet Archive.
Thanks,
Dorn
9/19/2019