films, page 10 of 31

Published in 1929, A High Wind in Jamaica has that Gorey-esque quality of seeming like it might be a genuine old-time classic children’s book — in Humphrey Carpenter’s terms, it could be of the ‘Arcadian’ type of idealised childhood, its ‘secret garden’ a stint the Bas-Thorntons spend on a pirate ship — but beneath its light, storytelling air, it’s far darker than those old-time children’s classics ever were. Dickensian in tone, with Dickens’s love of the comic grotesque, both in over-the-top characterisation and the theatrical set-piece, there’s a subtle but powerful undercurrent building around the only rarely-explored inner life of its key character, ten-year-old Emily, and how she’s affected both by what happens to her and (perhaps more crucially) what she does, during her time with Captain Jonsen and his men.

The novel starts with the Bas-Thornton children living semi-wild on a rundown estate in Jamaica. It is the mid-1800s, after the emancipation of the slaves, and the sugar plantations are mostly abandoned and derelict. Then along comes a hurricane, taking the top off the Bas-Thorntons’ house. Their parents decide the children would be safer at school in England, and ship them off, only for them to be taken by pirates en route. The pirates at first don’t know what to do with the children. Captain Jonsen is hardly vicious enough to simply kill or maroon them, even when they take over his deck, and adopt some vital ship’s gear for use in various games (young Rachel keeps claiming things to be her baby-dolls); they may even be useful in his particular form of piracy, as a distraction to make a potential target ship think his is just a harmless passenger vessel, so he can get close enough to board. For a while, the children aren’t even aware they’re on a pirate ship. Totally lost in their own little worlds, they think this is simply another stage on their journey to England:

‘Margaret said,’ went on Rachel, ‘that time we were shut up on the other ship she heard one of the sailors calling out pirates had come on board.’

Emily had an inspiration. ‘No, you silly, he must have said pilots.’

‘What are pilots?’ asked Laura.

‘They Come On Board,’ explained Emily, lamely. ‘Don’t you remember that picture in the dining-room at home, called The Pilot Comes On Board?’

Hughes takes pains to present the children as anything but the clichéd little angels of most Victorian fiction: these are utterly self-involved, given to bursts of fondness or indifference, brushing against the adult world only briefly, like whales surfacing to breathe:

‘How then can one begin to describe the inside of Laura, where the child-mind lived in the midst of the familiar relics of the baby-mind, like a Fascist in Rome?’

The children and the pirates co-exist mostly (at first) by ignoring one another. The pirates seem, at times, to look fondly on the children in their innocence and playfulness; the children try to ignore all clues that the pirates may be pirates — apart from thirteen year old Margaret, the eldest, who instantly knows what’s in store for her from these male criminals. The other, younger, children don’t understand her terror and think she’s being silly. But into this seemingly comic, meandering narrative, hints of a real darkness come through: accidents (one fatal, one near-fatal), then, one drunken night, the pirates come for Margaret — they may even be coming for ten-year-old Emily, too, but she bites Captain Jonsen’s thumb, and this seems to remind him she’s still a child, or perhaps makes him realise she’s too wild to risk, so she doesn’t suffer the more fatalistic Margaret’s (un-mentioned) fate. The journey continues, just as light in tone, just as twisted in implied detail.

It’s only at the end, with the children returned to civilisation, when the adults in London try to prise the truth from the children’s mix of outright fantasy and downright silence, that you get a sense of the trauma they may be suffering beneath their outward normalcy. As the lawyer Mathias says near the end:

‘It’s bad enough having a child in the [witness] box anyway… You can never count on them. They say what they think you want them to say. And then they say what they think the opposing counsel wants them to say too…’

At the end, we’re left with a sense that this adventure is a formative one for the children, but not in any clearly-defined way. The children have brushed against terrors and adventures, yes, but have also spent a lot of time just being themselves — undoubtedly in strange circumstances, but to a child, as Hughes points out, all circumstances are strange, it’s all new. Emily, stocking up on experiences, thinks, at first, it’s enough to have experienced a genuine earthquake right at the start of the novel; her time with Captain Jonsen, with whom she even begins to develop the sort of relationship she never had with her rather distant parents, is too much an undigestible and contradictory mass for her to call it any one thing (as Hughes says, ‘Children have little faculty of distinguishing between disaster and the ordinary course of their lives’); and the one deed she does which nobody guesses (its one witness, Margaret, is too traumatised by her own experiences to talk about it, or anything else), all go towards the making of her as a person, in ways too complex to be simply stated: Hughes’s very silence on the matter speaks far more eloquently.

Throughout, A High Wind in Jamaica has been subtly undermining its own slightly distant tone, building this sense of an unspeakable tension, a hidden trauma, that is only to be dealt with by not speaking of it, except near the end, when the image of Emily, self-contained once more after a single, brief outburst of emotion in court (easily overlooked by all the adults present), is what lingers with me now the book’s read.

A High Wind in Jamaica was made into a surprisingly faithful film in 1965, with Anthony Quinn as the pirate captain (not Jonsen here, but Chavez, as no-one would believe Quinn was Danish). Somehow, the Hollywood sheen (though it’s a UK film) works just as well as Hughes’s light, Dickensian prose style to take the edge off the awful events, and the impassivity of Deborah Baxter as Emily perfectly captures her child-like impenetrability right up to that tell-tale break-down in court.

As a follow-up to the Adventure Films Podcast, Garen and I are embarking on a 10-episode War Films Podcast. Each episode , we discuss one of ten films, already listed over at the Adventure Films Podcast blog. First up is 1961’s The Guns of Navarone:

Sometimes the quieter characters are the more interesting ones. Franics Ford Coppola’s The Conversation lets us into the tightly-controlled, paranoid world of Harry Caul (played by one of my favourite actors, Gene Hackman), a lone-wolf surveillance expert renowned for his ability to tape the untapeable. As the film starts we see him working on just such an operation, using a variety of microphones to capture a conversation between a young couple as they wander round a busy city square at lunchtime; then, back in his office (the wire-caged end of an otherwise empty floor), he gets down to what you just know is his favourite part: hidden away from the world, fine-tuning the mix of his audio sources into a single, listenable record of this mysterious, fragmented conversation. Harry Caul is a craftsman.

He’s also a deeply vulnerable man. All the control, all the paranoia — a consequence, perhaps, of knowing how much can be listened to, recorded, gleaned — makes the vulnerability that much more plain. Caul wears a finicky but oh-so-practical transparent mac over his work clothes, which could be the symbol of the namesake birth-caul he seems to be keeping himself wrapped in, a barrier against the world. He claims to have no phone in his apartment, but we know he has, we see him using it. He regularly visits a woman (Terri Garr) who doesn’t know what he does for a living, or where he lives, but still knows more about him than Harry would like. The way he enters her apartment, for instance: “You have a certain way of opening the door. You know, first the key goes in all quiet, and then the door comes open real fast, like you think you’ll catch me at something.” Whatever secrets Harry thinks he has, the truth about his vulnerability and fear of opening up is obvious to everyone.

As much as the first half of The Conversation is a plunge for us into Harry’s strange world, in the second half, he plunges deeper still into vulnerability and paranoia. When he goes to deliver the minutely polished tape of that lunchtime conversation, he’s told he can’t hand it over in person. So, he gives back the money and leaves with the tape. This, oddly, makes the character in my eyes — he may be strange, he may be reserved and secretive, but he has an ethic, not just to his craft, but to his word.

The key scene where everything goes wrong comes soon after. There’s a surveillance industry conference and he and a few fellow professionals go back to Caul’s office with some drinks and a couple of good-time girls. Harry does a quick scan to make sure all the sensitive materials are hidden, locked away in a cage-within-the-cage of his already cage-like office. His fellow experts try to get him to open up about his past triumphs, to no avail. We learn that Harry once taped an impossible-to-tape conversation that got some people killed. They joke, but Harry doesn’t like it. He takes one of the women off into the empty space of his office and finally opens up to someone — only to find his colleagues listening in, playing a trick. But this is nothing compared to the trick the woman’s playing on him.

The thing with this sort of story is first to make, then break, a character. A difficult-to-like person like Harry has first to be made in our eyes — we have to find him interesting (he’s certainly that, with his highly controlled ways) but also worth liking (and I think this is where his work ethic, and his keeping to his word despite having to turn down money, wins us over to this otherwise cold fish — that’s if his secret saxophone playing hasn’t already). But then, just when we’re starting to get comfortable in his distinctly uncomfortable world, the breaking starts. That precious, worked-over-a-hundred-times tape is taken off him, and he’s desperate to know it’s not going to be used to harm the young couple, not like last time, not again. He uses his surveillance skills to try to find out, but he’s close to breaking point. The need to know won’t help a jot if the deed’s already done. But, it turns out, Harry’s being tricked again. All that carefulness, control and paranoia only makes him that much more vulnerable. He’s not just been tricked, he’s being played.

At the end, a single phone call — to that phone he claims he doesn’t have — is enough to tip him over the edge. They’ve bugged the world-proof enclosure of his apartment. And Harry, being the surveillance expert he is, can think of a thousand places they might have planted a bug, and a thousand types of bug they might have planted. He proceeds to tear his little sanctum apart, till he’s left with nothing, a ruin — the end result of all his attempts to control the uncontrollable. Even though, we know, from watching him, that the few secrets he has aren’t worth anyone’s while trying to discover. They’re the simple human secrets and vulnerabilities we all have, only Harry has them all the more because he pretends he doesn’t.