I've just finished listening to this book (written by J.G. Ballard, published in 1984, and based on his own experiences in Shanghai and in Lunghua Civilian Assembly Centre, where he and his parents were interned from 1942-45). The unusual insight it offers into this little piece of WWII will stay with me for a long time, I think.

We see the war through the eyes of Jim, an 11-year-old British child, who (unlike the author) has been separated from his parents in the chaotic aftermath of Pearl Harbour, when Japanese occupying forces arrived in Shanghai's international settlement. First, he has to survive the cut and thrust of a largely anarchic city. Next, he has to learn to negotiate internment camp life, which offers privations and horrors, but also a semblance of security and routine. Then, even when the war officially ends, it doesn't end for Jim, but moves on to another phase. Chaos and danger still reign, as various forces mass to fill the power vacuum left by the retreating Japanese, or to fill their coffers with loot and tradeable items. You could still die at any minute.

In fact, the book is littered with corpses. The reader/listener is awed and appalled at the amount of death this child has witnessed... Opening and closing the narrative are the coffins of the Chinese poor: "Every night in Shanghai those Chinese too poor to pay for the burial of their relatives would launch the bodies from the funeral piers at Nantao, decking the coffins with paper flowers. Carried away on the tide, they came back on the next, returning to the waterfront of Shanghai with all the other debris abandoned by the city."


The photos in this post were taken in Shanghai in 2016 and 2018

Jim's is a dispassionate eye, so the story is refreshingly even-handed. He has Japanese cruelty in front of him every day, but he also admires the conquerors and their achievements, and is sometimes not sure who he wants to win the war. He admires the American internees, with their bravado and their knack for organizing themselves. He despises the whingeing Brits.

Overall, there is nothing noble and heroic about Jim's war. Few are wholly good or wholly bad. It's a battle for survival; he is always hungry; and everywhere there is tumult and disorder.

One of the first things I noticed about the narrative was its powerfully dreamlike quality. The once ordinary is distorted, or gruesomely out of place. The truly horrible is recounted as though it were commonplace. We are told at one point: "Jim knew that he was awake and asleep at the same time, dreaming of the war and yet dreamed of by the war." And the story consistently blurs the line between dreaming and waking, between internal and external images. We open with newsreels that become inseparable from Jim's own thought processes. We end with newsreels as, the war over, Jim and his mother set sail for England.



This distinctive style is very nicely contextualized by John Lanchester in his introduction to one of the print editions. I've read nothing else by Ballard, but according to Lanchester, Empire of the Sun is the "key" to his earlier (loosely science fiction) work. The worlds he had created in those stories "shared a particular strain of imagery to do with abandonment: empty swimming-pools, crashed planes, deserted or ruined buildings, objects made by and for humans now given over to unimagined purposes, or reclaimed by nature. The source and locus of all these imaginings suddenly became clear: Shanghai."

The influence of this period shows up firstly in the dreamlike aura I noted, in which "the reality in front of our eyes is never much more than a stage set, a temporary scene that can be instantly and irrevocably swept away..."

(This conception of the world, and the way we remember and interpret it, was underlined by Ballard himself in 2006, when he reflected on the experience of watching Steven Spielberg's 1987 film adaptation of the book: "I was deeply moved by the film but, like every novelist, couldn't help feeling that my memories had been hijacked by someone else's... Actors of another kind play out our memories, performing on a stage inside our heads whenever we think of childhood, our first day at school, courtship and marriage. The longer we live -- and it's now 60 years since I reluctantly walked out of Lunghua camp -- the more our repertory company emerges from the shadows and moves to the front of the stage. Spielberg's film seems more truthful as the years pass. Christian Bale and John Malkovich join hands by the footlights with my real parents and my younger self, with the Japanese soldiers and American pilots, as a boy runs forever across a peaceful lawn towards the coming war. But perhaps, in the end, it's all only a movie.")

According to Lanchester, the Shanghai influence is also recognizable in the way images "hover on the edge of being symbols", and very powerful descriptions are "recounted with a consciously flat affect". Ballards' characters apparently "never admit to horror. This deadpan manner is one of the things which makes his work so forceful and so disturbing. Its origin -- this distinctive, mesmerizing emotional flatness -- is to be found in Shanghai. It seems to come from a childhood exposure to many things that a child should never see."



Ballard's 2006 article also offers us an interesting insight into the genesis of the work, which is worth quoting at length:

"Coming to England after the war, and trying to cope with its grey, unhappy people, I hoarded my memories of Shanghai, a city that soon seemed as remote and glamorous as ancient Rome. Its magic never faded, whereas I forgot Cambridge within five minutes of leaving that academic theme park, and never wanted to go back. The only people I remembered were the dissecting room cadavers."

Aagh -- there's those bodies again... But to resume:

"How do you convey the casual surrealism of war, the deep silence of abandoned villages and paddy fields, the strange normality of a dead Japanese soldier lying by the road like an unwanted piece of luggage?

"I waited 40 years before giving it a go, one of the longest periods a professional writer has put off describing the most formative events in his life. Twenty years to forget, and then 20 years to remember...

"I found it difficult to begin the novel, until it occurred to me to drop my parents from the story... My real existence took place in the camp, wheedling dog-eared copies of Popular Mechanics and Reader's Digest from the American merchant seamen in the men's dormitory, hunting down every rumour in the air, waiting for the food cart and the next B-29 bombing raid. My mind was expanding to fill the possibilities of the war, something I needed to do on my own. Once I separated Jim from his parents the novel unrolled itself at my feet like a bullet-ridden carpet."

And indeed, the story rattles along, enlivened by memorable, often ambivalent characters, and vivid description.

Verdict: dense, hypnotic, very rewarding. Should be required reading for anyone envisaging starting a war...