A review by emkoshka
A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes

2.0

I read this while in Puerto Rico, having spent two months in some of the countries in the Eastern Caribbean a few months prior and thoroughly warmed by the author's mention of glorious tropical plants like bamboo, frangipani and coconuts. Apart from that though, I’m not sure what there is to recommend this book as a 'modern classic', as my Penguin edition is. It's bizarre at best, surreal-absurdist at worst, as when one character wantonly falls 40 feet onto his head in a scene involving a cow being winched into a warehouse. And then every other character pretends he didn't exist. I guess I was expecting something a little more Lord of the Flies and a little less carnivalesque. And gosh, Edwardian children were so damn strange, barely children at all but mannered little adults prone to fits of crazy fancy. Strange, unsettling, dream-like.