Another Typhoon

In Hazard. By Richard Hughes. Harper & Brothers. $2.50

What Richard Hughes has, above all else, is the power to startle. This is a great and dangerous gift which in the hands of a Faulkner, a Cocteau, a Julian Green, has been often overplayed. Hughes abuses it less: he is not, like Faulkner, an undisciplined writer or like Cocteau a slick one. He is sly; but he seeks precise effects, he comes down clean like the blade of a guillotine, and when he makes the physical world dance it is in order to shake or overturn something in the moral world. In A High Wind in Jamaica he leapt over grown-up barriers into the secret life of childhood, and made the actions of his kids cast a long, upsetting moral shadow. So disquieting was this hidden world that we came away less shocked by what we had learned than stunned by what we still might not know. If the situations of A High Wind in Jamaica are tricky and faraway, there is this irony about them: that from the last pirate ship to sail the seas there emerged this first strange voyage into the child mind, with its deep-rooted, untameable heresies.