Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2015 March 25 • Wednesday

Richard Hughes’s A High Wind in Jamaica starts slowly. The first line is “One of the fruits of Emancipation in the West Indian islands is the number of ruins, either attached to the houses that remain or within a stone’s throw of them: ruined slaves’ quarters, ruined sugar-grinding houses, ruined boiling houses; often ruined mansions that were too expensive to maintain”.

The story concerns the adventures of a group of English children who end up living on a pirate ship. This isn’t Treasure Island, though. Piracy is a means of just scraping by and the pirates themselves are a shabby lot who don’t even have guns on their ship but use chicanery to board and loot vessels.

The children are free to do whatever they want on ship and most of the time is spent inside their heads. This is facilitated by Hughes’s assured and ironical writing style. (He has a strange way of using colons. He uses them as commas, semi-colons and even sometimes as colons.)

Once the pirates show up, the book becomes very absorbing, though this is no blood and thunder tale. The children and the pirates both live outside of society’s norms and laws, the pirates by choice and the children by nature. As the arc of their voyage gradually descends, the children grow up. The pirates have a different fate.