New York Guild Enters 3rd Play: 'Innocent Voyage' Follows on Heels of 'Oklahoma'; and 'Othello,'" The Gazette (Montreal) (Tuesday, 16 November 1943), p. 3

In late August 1929, five months after the US publication of his novel, A High Wind in Jamaica (US title The Innocent Voyage), the 29-year-old British author Richard Hughes, was crossing the Atlantic on the SS De Grasse in time for the British publication in September. Deeply bizarre and sometimes hilarious...particularly diverting is the sly narrative voice, which keeps darting around and sneaking up on you. It's the perfect intellectual seafaring adventure. A High Wind in Jamaica is a 1929 novel by the Welsh writer Richard Hughes, which was made into a film of the same name in 1965. The book was initially titled The Innocent Voyage and published by Harper & Brothers in the spring of that year. Several months later Hughes renamed his novel in time for its British publication, [1] and Harper followed suit. [2] The original title retained some currency, as evidenced by Paul Osborn's 1943 stage adaptation. [3] [4] There have since been two radio adaptations (one written in 1950 by Jane Speed for NBC University Theater; [5] the other in 2000 by Bryony Lavery for BBC Radio 4 [6]), with the title A High Wind in Jamaica. So this was an alligator! She was actually going to sleep with an alligator! She had thought that to anyone who had once been in an earthquake nothing really exciting could happen again: but then, she had not thought of this.Early in the novel, the Bas-Thornton children go to spend a few days with the Fernandez children -- Margaret and Harry. It is during this stay the children witness the first of the two natural disasters that open the novel: an earthquake. Hughes’ particular genius is his ability to see --without sentiment - through the eyes of a child. His description of their reaction to the earthquake, in all its disorienting effects, rings true: During one snowy day, I read the whole book in one gulp. It was remarkable, tiny, crazy. I felt just like I did as a kid.

Hughes did not publish his next novel for 22 years. A Fox in the Attic was planned as the opening volume of a tetralogy bearing the portentous title “The Human Predicament”. It was an impressive and unusual historical novel, based on lengthy research and chronicling the rise of Nazism. The book had a similar divergence of tone - what Kenneth Allsop called “the sinister and the frolicsome” - that he had employed so brilliantly in A High Wind in Jamaica. The book opens on the island of Jamaica, in the early to mid-1800s, introducing readers to the Bas-Thornton children - in particular John and Emily. The setting is Edenic, with the children often going about naked -- being quite comfortable in having gone “native.” They spend their days swimming, climbing trees, and capturing animals. At one point -- morally telling -- the children muse over the fact that “jiggers” (maggots) are “not absolutely unpleasant” and there is now a “sort of thrill” rubbing the skin (like the natives) where their eggs are laid. The eye of an alligator is large, protruding, and of a brilliant yellow, with a slit pupil like a cat’s. A cat’s eye, to the casual observer, is expressionless: though with attention one can distinguish in it many changes of emotion. But the eye of an alligator is infinitely more stony, and brilliant - reptilian. In the final scene children play innocently by a lake. Emily stands amongst them—staring at a model ship with adult eyes.As a novelist, Hughes is a peculiar mixture of craftsman, savant and amateur. He is capable of marvelous, hypnotic prose, but can also write a sentence like this: “But it was not her, it was the meal which raped Jose’s attention.” Even Homer nodded, but details also get tangled, as “the ship’s monkey” becomes the novel’s focus briefly and meets a startling end. Not long afterward another monkey appears, with no introduction or explanation. Most frustrating of all is the inconsistency or narrative voice. Throughout most of the tale, the narrator is allowed access to the minds of the characters, but at some junctures, he (or “it”) confesses in a manner reminiscent of Fielding that a particular motive or outcome is beyond his knowledge or understanding. And yet, the raw power and contained hysteria of the story make these errors forgivable. He was omnipresent: the faeries were more localized, living in a small hole in the hill guarded by two dagger-plants.