0729 | Empire of the Sun | J. G. Ballard
Context: The kids had a club on the beach where I sat while reading this.
Once Ballard had got the likes of The Drowned World and in particular Crash out of his system, he could finally settle down and write a novel accessible to the masses. That novel was Empire of the Sun.
Many more people know it from the film adaptation by Steven Spielberg than from the novel, and that means that many people don’t know how preoccupied Ballard is with the darker side of life.
To satisfy his preoccupation with doom and gloom, there’s a corpse on virtually every page of this tale of a boy separated from his parents, roaming war-torn Shanghai in the aftermath of the Japanese post-Pearl Harbour expansion into East Asia.
While it paints an authentic image of the carnage and suffering, there’s absolutely no sympathy for anyone. In that it not only accurately portrays the viewpoint of a spoiled 10 year old product of empire, it also accurately portrays Ballard. Oh, did I mention this is semi-autobiographical?
Jamie ends up on a pile of half-dead Europeans bouncing around the back of a truck while it wends its way to one of many prison camps. The novel then follows Jamie’s jaunts around camp and, as the war ends, the surviving prisoners’ cautious explorations back in Shanghai as things return to a new, apocalyptic normal.
Because it’s not non-fiction, it’s hard to take this too seriously as a glimpse into history. It’s more useful as a portrayal of the horrific result of humanity applying itself. In that, it entirely fits into the Ballardian oeuvre.
If you’ve read any more of his work, you’ll get that. If you haven’t, you’re more likely to come away from it thinking that it’s a sad tale of a lost little boy rather than one in a life’s work of novels about a lost little species. But, either way, you’ll ultimately come away considering it was worth the read.
