Screenshot of text. It says: 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
I read Richard Hughes's novel A High Wind in Jamaica every few years, and just finished reading it again. Many novelists have inimitable voices, Austen, Dickens, Trollope, G. Eliot, etc. but they're consistent from book to book. This novel, though, is […]
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