In Hazard

by Richard Hughes, John Crowley (Introduction)

Overview

The Archimedes is a modern merchant steamship in tip-top condition, and in the summer of 1929 it has been picking up goods along the eastern seaboard of the United States before making a run to China. A little overloaded, perhaps—the oddly assorted cargo includes piles of old newspapers and heaps of tobacco—the ship departs for the Panama Canal from Norfolk, Virginia, on a beautiful autumn day. Before long, the weather turns unexpectedly rough—rougher in fact than even the most experienced members of the crew have ever encountered. The Archimedes, it turns out, has been swept up in the vortex of an immense hurricane, and for the next four days it will be battered and mauled by wind and waves as it is driven wildly off course. Caught in an unremitting struggle for survival, both the crew and the ship will be tested as never before.

Based on detailed research into an actual event, Richard Hughes’s tale of high suspense on the high seas is an extraordinary story of men under pressure and the unexpected ways they prove their mettle—or crack. Yet the originality, art, and greatness of In Hazard stem from something else: Hughes’s eerie fascination with the hurricane itself, the inhuman force around which this wrenching tale of humanity at its limits revolves. Hughes channels the furies of sea and sky into a piece of writing that is both apocalyptic and analytic. In Hazard is an unforgettable, defining work of modern adventure.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781590175330
Publisher:	New York Review Books
Publication date:	08/29/2012
Series:	New York Review Books Classics Series
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	248 KB

About the Author

Richard Hughes (1900-1976) was born in Surrey, England, but his ancestors came from Wales and he considered himself a Welshman. After an early childhood marked by the deaths of two older siblings and his father (his mother then went to work as a magazine journalist), Hughes attended boarding school and, with every expectation of being sent to fight in the First World War, enrolled in the military. Armistice was declared, however, before he could see active service, and Hughes was free to go to Oxford, where he became a star on the university literary scene, with a book of poems in print and a play produced in the West End by the time he graduated in 1922. Hughes’s first novel, A High Wind in Jamaica, came out in 1928 and was a best seller in the United Kingdom and America. In Hazard followed ten years later. Hughes also wrote stories for children and radio plays, but his final major undertaking was the “The Human Predicament”, an ambitious amalgamation of fact and fiction that would track the German and English branches of a single family into the disaster of the Second World War while offering a dramatic depiction of Hitler’s rise to power. The work was planned as a trilogy, but remained incomplete at the time of Hughes’s death. The first volume, The Fox in the Attic, appeared in 1960, to great critical acclaim; volume two, The Wooden Shepherdess, was published in 1973. All of Hughes’s completed novels are available from NYRB Classics.

John Crowley is the author of a dozen novels and works of fiction, among them Little, Big and the Aegypt Cycle, and, most recently, Four Freedoms. He is a three-time winner of the World Fantasy Award and a winner of the Award in Literature of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Crowley teaches creative writing at Yale University. His reviews and critical essays have appeared in the Boston Review, The Yale Review, and The Washington Post.

Editorial Reviews

" With his eerie narrator (Is it a surviving crew member? The author? Poseidon himself?), Hughes presents an atmospheric book that makes trouble with pirates, rocky shoals or white whales seem almost trifling." —Time Out New York

"The passages in literature that have thrilled me most have almost all been sea battles and storms. Now I have had the great and exhilarating pleasure of surviving yet another tempest in Richard Hughes's In Hazard, now equipped with an excellent introduction by John Crowley... The novel is superb." —Katharine Powers, The Boston Globe

"To take the same subject as Conrad in Typhoon would be foolhardy if it were not so triumphantly justified." -Graham Greene

"Richard Hughes is a genuine case of unfair neglect, and will some day be seen again as one of the very best novelist of the past hundred years from Great Britain...In Hazard is much more than a brilliant sea story. The tale is about extreme danger and human reactions to it...It seems just as apposite to our times, when we confront a bewildering range of hazards, including the destructiveness of nature, which we ourselves are probably exacerbating." -The Financial Times

"Richard Hughes...has done another magnificent saga of the sea in this novel which inevitably calls to mind Conrad's Typhoon, not for similarity in the progression of the novel, but because of the power with which the author evokes the man's struggle against the elements. A story of mad weather at sea, it is told with restraint, humor and irony. Almost compulsory reading." -North American Fiction Review

"In Hazard is not really a book about a storm, but about fear...what will stick in most minds are the sharp descriptive passages—of a scene, illuminated by lightning, when the crew looks out on a mountainside of water crawling with sharks." —Time

"The most intense reading experience of the year-easily-was discovering Richard Hughes's 1938 novel, In Hazard, a small masterpiece of lyric terror about a cargo ship that runs into a hurricane, but also about the rest of life. It might have helped that I read it in a force 10 gale on the Atlantic but reading it in the bath would probably have the same impact."-Simon Schama, The Guardian

"Every bit the equal of Perfect Storm, this is the story of a freighter that gets caught out in the worst hurricane ever recorded at the time. It's terrifying, and it's also wonderfully written." -Boat Safe

From the Publisher