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A review by nadinekc
A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes
I was hoping this novel would be strange and intriguing: blithely cruel 19th century British children on a grand adventure, told in an imperial, self-satisfied voice - but the first 10 pages disturbed me, and not in a good way. Really, the first page did me in with this:
With Emancipation, like many others, that [plantation] went bung. The sugar buildings fell down. Bush smothered the cane and guinea-grass. The field negroes left their cottages in a body, to be somewhere less disturbed by even the possibility of work.
Maybe all of this is subverted in the rest of the tale, maybe it has clever and cynical things to say about morality that would make it all worth reading, but I just couldn't stand it. I realize it was written in 1929 and I am generally capable of suspending my 21st century sensibilities for books of another era, but not this time. I did read Francine Prose's Introduction, which gave me all that was valuable about the book without the pain of actually reading it.
With Emancipation, like many others, that [plantation] went bung. The sugar buildings fell down. Bush smothered the cane and guinea-grass. The field negroes left their cottages in a body, to be somewhere less disturbed by even the possibility of work.
Maybe all of this is subverted in the rest of the tale, maybe it has clever and cynical things to say about morality that would make it all worth reading, but I just couldn't stand it. I realize it was written in 1929 and I am generally capable of suspending my 21st century sensibilities for books of another era, but not this time. I did read Francine Prose's Introduction, which gave me all that was valuable about the book without the pain of actually reading it.