Empire of The Sun - J G Ballard

Empire of the Sun is set in Shangahai in WWII and tells the story of the internment of foreign nationals in the city through the eyes of a young British boy. It is a very good read for several reasons:

• It had the gripping power of an eye-witness account as it mirrors Ballard's own experiences.
• It was war seen through the eyes of boy, a completely different perspective from that of an adult.
• It was set in a place and period of which I was ignorant - Shanghai in 1930’s-40’s with a confusing mix of nationalities seemingly unaffected by the war in Europe so it was good to tread new ground.

I started to read but quickly became confused. It’s all very well living inside the head of an intelligent, unusual boy, but what was going on? Who was who and what was what? Why were the Japanese in charge in Shanghai in 1940 and not the Chinese?

I had to orientate myself. So, I looked up a basic map of Shanghai in those years, including finding out where Jim's home in Amherst Avenue was. Then I did some research to find out why there was an International Settlement and a French Concession. The 1937 Sino-Japanese war explained the presence of the Japanese who had invaded China and were fighting the Chinese Nationalist army. The Nationalists were also facing a Communist insurgency and adding to the confusion were the Chinese War-Lords seeking to exploit war for their own ends.




Despite educating myself on the place and period, when I picked up the book again, I was back in a very confused world because I was back in the mind of a boy, seeing with his eyes, thinking his thoughts. He too does not know what is going on. Jim sees Japanese planes as wonders of aviation, to be admired, not feared. War is exciting images in magazines – a Boys Own adventure story, not death and destruction. As he goes to church, school and garden parties, in his imagination he is commanding a tank or flying a fighter plane. Then the Japanese attack Pearl Harbour, his world collapses, he finds himself alone and he needs to survive.

The book is excellent in telling the story of Jim’s survival. He is independent, free-spirited and courageous. Even when the harsh realities of the camp threaten starvation and death, he inhabits his own reality where death is simply the separation of the soul from the body. As he lies exhausted and starving in the stadium he wonders if he is already dead.

“Whatever happened, he would survive. He thought of Mrs Philips and Mrs Gilmour and their discussion of the exact moment at which the soul left the body of the dying. Jim’s soul had already left his body and no longer needed his thin bones and open sores in order to endure. He was dead, as were Mr Maxted and Dr Ransome. Everyone in Lunghua was dead. It was absurd that they had failed to grasp this.”

Ballard brings in the wider war in bits and pieces as the prisoners would receive it. The dropping of the A-bomb is done brilliantly:

But a flash of light filled the stadium, flaring over the stands in the south-west corner of the football field, as if an immense American bomb had exploded somewhere to the north-east of Shanghai. The sentry hesitated, looking over his shoulder as the light behind him grew more intense. It faded within a few seconds, but its pale Sheen covered everything within the stadium, the looted furniture in the stands, the cars behind the goal posts, the prisoners on the grass. They were sitting on the floor of a furnace heated by a second sun.

Ballard is using poetic licence here. The distance is too great for the flash to be witnessed.

Jim has an instinct of what he must do to survive and quickly learns to meet people’s needs using the time-honoured currency of barter.

The book is also the story of the chief victims of all wars, the helpless civilians who are caught up in a murderous conflict they can do nothing to control. We see the hero’s and the cowards, the self-giving and the self-serving, those with inner strength and those too weak to endure.

Survival of the fittest plays out in its most animal form. An unbending will for personal survival and a ruthless indifference to the suffering of others seemed to give you the best chance of going on living, yet we place Dr Ransome in a different moral universe from Basie and wonder, how would I behave?

“..those who worked hardest for others, like Mrs Philips and Mrs Gilmour and Dr Ransome, often held beliefs that turned out to be correct.”

This was an intriguing novel and very well written. Ballard pushes the war into the background and concentrates on a few well-drawn characters to depict the boredom, struggle and horror of life in a prison camp. He shows us a primitive world where everything superficial in adult life Is stripped away and the true nature of the individual is revealed. In this world is a child, uncontaminated by the sins and cares of adulthood, who, though his innocence, imagination and optimism sees everything differently. This contrast is what makes The Empire of The Sun such a compelling read.

A few quotes:

For the first time he felt able to enjoy the war. He gazed happily at the burnt-out trams and tenement blocks, at the thousands of doors open to the clouds, a deserted city invaded by the sky. It only disappointed him that his fellow prisoners failed to share his excitement

To their credit, in Jim’s eyes, neither the Americans nor the Dutch and Belgians in the camp wasted their time on nostalgia. The years in Lunghua had not given Jim a high opinion of the British.

All in all, Jim felt, the Americans were the best company, not as strange and challenging as the Japanese, but far superior to the morose and complicated British.

But Jim was glad that the Mustangs were so close. His eyes feasted on every rivet in their fuselages, on the gun ports in their wings, on the huge ventral radiators that Jim was sure had been put there for reasons of style alone. Jim admired the Hayates and Zeros of the Japanese, but the Mustang fighters were the Cadillacs of air combat.

Jim, they’ll fight. As you’ve loyally maintained, the Japanese are the bravest soldiers in the world.’
Well …’ Talk of bravery embarrassed Jim. War had nothing to do with bravery
The Japanese are brave,’ Jim conceded. ‘But bravery isn’t important now.’
I’m not so sure. Are you brave, Jim?’
‘No … of course not. But I could be,’ Jim asserted. ‘I think you are.’

It would be a pity for Mr Maxted to die just as his Studebaker arrived to take him back to the Shanghai nightclubs.

An immense pathos surrounded the throttle and undercarriage levers; the rivets stamped into the metal fabric by some unknown Japanese woman on the Mitsubishi assembly line.

Jim despaired. For so long he had invested all his hopes in this young pilot, in that futile dream that they would fly away together, leaving Lunghua, Shanghai and the war forever behind them. He had needed the pilot to help him survive the war, this imaginary twin he had invented, a replica of himself whom he watched through the barbed wire. If the Japanese was dead, part of himself had died. He had failed to grasp the truth that millions of Chinese had known from birth, that they were all as good as dead anyway, and that it was self-deluding to believe otherwise.