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内容説明
Written in 1929, this is the gripping story of the Bas-Thornton children, whose parents send them to safety in England following a hurricane in the post-colonial Jamaica they call home. Their voyage turns from a peaceful farewell to their idyllic carefree lives to a perilous adventure when their ship is captured by pirates. The novel is often called one of the best of the 20th Century. Hughes was praised for his portrayal of children; they are subject to violence and not beyond committing terrible acts themselves, and in writing children without emotional reduction he paved the way for other masterworks as William Golding's Lord Of The Flies.
Amazon.com
A High Wind in Jamaica is not so much a book as a curious object, like a piece of driftwood torqued into an alarming shape from years at sea. And like driftwood, it seems not to have been made, exactly, but simply to have come into being, so perfectly is its form married to its content. The five Bas-Thornton children must leave their parents in Jamaica after a terrible hurricane blows down their family home. Accompanied by their Creole friends, the Fernandez children, they board a ship that is almost immediately set upon by pirates. The children take to corsair life coolly and matter-of-factly; just as coolly do they commit horrible deeds, and have horrible deeds visited upon them. First published in 1929, A High Wind in Jamaica has been compared to Lord of the Flies in its unflinching portrayal of innocence corrupted, but Richard Hughes is the supreme ironist William Golding never was. He possesses the ability to be one moment thoroughly inside a character's head, and the next outside of it altogether, hilariously commenting.
Irony finds a happy home indeed in the book's mixture of the macabre and the adorable. The baby girl, Rachel, "could even sum up maternal feelings for a marline-spike, and would sit up aloft rocking it in her arms and crooning. The sailors avoided walking underneath: for such an infant, if dropped from a height, will find its way through the thickest skull (an accident which sometimes befalls unpopular captains)." In that "such an infant" lies a world of mordant wit. In fact, throughout, Hughes's wildly eccentric punctuation and startling syntax make just the right verbal vehicle for this dark-hearted pirate story for grownups.
Hughes enjoys some coy riffing on the child mind, as with this description of the way Emily handles an uncomfortable social situation: "Much the best way of escaping from an embarrassing rencontre, when to walk away would be an impossible strain on the nerves, is to retire in a series of somersaults. Emily immediately started turning head over heels up the deck." Even so, Hughes never sentimentalizes his subject: "Babies of course are not human--they are animals, and have a very ancient and ramified culture, as cats have, and fishes, and even snakes." Children, as a race, are given rough treatment: "their minds are not just more ignorant and stupider than ours, but differ in kind of thinking (are mad, in fact)." That madness is here isolated, prodded, and poked to chilling effect. But Hughes never loses sight of his ultimate objective: A High Wind in Jamaica is, above all, a cracking good yarn. --Claire Dederer
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カスタマーレビュー
最も参考になったカスタマーレビュー
形式:ペーパーバック
Rarely does it happen that books leave you feeling queasy, but craving for more. Much to its credit, A High Wind in Jamaica has achieved this to an extent seen before only in Stephen King's better novels and Golding's Lord of the Flies. Starting from the very serene setting of parents seeing off their children back home, the novel moves, gradually at first and then plunges headlong, towards showing us glimpses of the consequences of human nature swinging wildly from the pure and innocent to the corrupt and vile simply by being among the wrong people in the wrong place at the wrong time. Even as we grow to shudder reading about the same children that we adored at the start of the novel, there is the uneasy sense of knowing that they are not to blame for what they have become, and that we ourselves have every chance of going down that same route if we were put in similar situations. A book that deserves to be a lot more popular than it actually is.
Amazon.com で最も参考になったカスタマーレビュー (beta)
Amazon.com:
63件のカスタマーレビュー
83 人中、81人の方が、｢このレビューが参考になった｣と投票しています。
One of the greatest novels I've ever read
2003/11/1
形式:ペーパーバック
On its surface, Hughes' High Wind in Jamaica is the story of two families of young cchildren, sent home to England by their parents following a cataclysmic hurricane that levels their plantation in Jamaica. Subsequently the children are kidnapped by pirates; the book follows their story until their eventual return to England. The pirates turn out to be, for the most part, well-intended and even protective of the children, but by the end of the story the same cannot really be said of the children themselves, whose behavior at points seems threatening and malevolent by comparison to their captors.
Others have made a comparison between this book and "Lord of the Flies," both because of their stories of children torn apart from the moorings of civilization, and for their undercurrent emotion of malevolence, darkness, and evil. To my mind, Hughes' intent is broader than that, and I actually prefer "High Wind" to its rival. Hughes is also exploring a more general theme of alienation and the kind of moral emptiness that accompanies it: child vs. adult, plantation owners vs. slaves, the wild of Jamaica vs. the civilized form of the British Empire, each unknowing and thus cruel to the other.
The ending is actually shocking, a perfect end to this highly unconventional but perfectly-pitched book. One of my "best ever" novels.
49 人中、48人の方が、｢このレビューが参考になった｣と投票しています。
merciless
2003/12/21
形式:ペーパーバック
This is a wonderful book. Short, swift and very bloody, Hughes tells a story of children as seperate from adult human nature and explores the ways in which children can cope with danger and catastrophe in the light of the usual adult nervous fumbling. It is a psychological portrait, but is so much more as well. An exciting action-adventure; an epic on nature and the sea; a ruthless story of pirates in the age of their decline; a terrifying masterwork detailing the lies all people must tell themselves in order to survive.
It is difficult to sum up exactly what is going on throughout the book, event leading to action leading to betrayal leading to another fun game. In the end the book might even be read as a comedy--that of a pessimist attacking both human nature and the world--and I must admit that throughout several of the more harrowing scenes I found myself laughing in self-defense.
Great, great stuff, beautifully written and compelling. I wouldn't presume to guess how any one individual might take it and that, to me, the unexpectedness of the whole thing, is what constitutes some of the greatest masterpieces. Very highly recommended--
36 人中、35人の方が、｢このレビューが参考になった｣と投票しています。
What a Wonderful, Strange Find
2003/8/13
形式:ペーパーバック
I'll never be able to say the MLA's list of the greatest novels of the 20th Century was a total waste, because it made me aware of this book's existence.
I'd never heard of "A High Wind in Jamaica," and had a hell of a time trying to find it---I ended up in the basement of a branch of my public library (I guess I shouldn't be endorsing the use of libraries on Amazon's site, but I can't afford to buy every book I want to read---sorry, Amazon). Once I started it, I couldn't put it down.
I'm always wishing I could find books like the ones it seems are only written for children. Kids get great books---full of adventure and fantasy and harrowing escapes, etc. It always sounds fun to go back and read books that enthralled me as a kid so I can recapture the same feelings that filled me then. But it never works. I can never get into kids' books in the same way, no matter how hard I try.
"A High Wind in Jamaica" is like a children's book written for adults. It's got all the right elements: tropical locations, a harrowing storm, pirates, murder. But the psychological element Richard Hughes gives to the story adds a dark, brutal dimension that children's books are often missing altogether or only skate briefly by.
This novel has a wonderful way of seeing events through the eyes of a child, and it functions as a sort of warning not to forget that children, though maybe possessing less life experience than adults, are capable of feeling the same emotions and, more importantly, have the potential to be just as brutal. In fact, Hughes suggests that children may actually be more brutal, since they have less of a knowledge base from which to understand and weigh consequences.
I don't want to make this book sound over burdened with rhetoric and psychobabble, however. It's a fast-paced, tense novel, with a menacing tone constantly present just under the surface. Hughes creates beautiful images of Jamaica in the book's early chapters, and paints a vivid picture of life at sea later on.
If I actually had any money, I would buy the rights to this book, because it would make a great movie.
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