A High Wind in Jamaica

The book opens among the ruined houses of the West Indies,
slave quarters and mansions democratically leveled by
“earthquake, fire, rain, and deadlier vegetation,” and features a
frightening cameo appearance of the Misses Parkers, a pair of
bedridden elderly heiresses starved to death by their servants
amid ormolu clocks and the bloodied feathers of slaughtered
chickens. The scene is grim, fantastical, but the novel’s language
is delicate and precise—there is a humorous, chirpy cerebration
to its narrative voice—and right away we are conscious of, and
troubled by, the dissonance between tone and content—one that
turns out, however, to be central to the shocking story Hughes
has to tell. For on the surface, A High Wind in Jamaica is an
adventure yarn involving five British children captured by a crew
of pirates. But underneath this high-spirited romp is a story
about murder, senseless violence, gothic sexuality, and capricious
betrayal, a narrative that more nearly evokes the pictures of the
“outsider”artist Henry Darger than those of, say, Kate
Greenaway.