Rating: 4/5
Just now I finished Empire of the Sun by J.G. Ballard. The last few chapters were especially moving and well-written, proffering an eye-opening account of the horrific effects of WWII.
Set in wartime Japanese-occupied Shanghai, Empire of the Sun follows the story of a young British boy named Jim, beginning with him aged eleven and ending when he is fourteen. He spends much of these childhood years in a prison camp in Lunghua, China, where his childlike imagination, in trying to make sense of the chaotic maelstrom around him, forms a disturbingly simplistic and innocent view of WWII.
Ballard’s style of writing is hauntingly honest, but also manages to make something as horrible as war seem almost beautiful. Through the innocent imagination of his adolescent protagonist, Ballard conjures up eerily pretty images of horrific situations, as we see when he describes a burning aircraft as “a fragment of the sun”, two wandering Lunghua prisoners as “two old men stranded like ghosts in the middle of a conversation they had forgotten”, and the bright light of the atomic bomb dropping on Nagasaki as “God taking a photograph.”
It’s interesting to see how Ballard portrays soldiers of various nationalities as having wholly different viewpoints on the war. Jim casually blankets the Americans as being very much disconnected from (and completely uninterested in) the war, as he illustrates in this passage:
Jim realised that the entire experience of the war had barely touched the American. All the deaths and starvation were part of a confused roadside drama seen through the passenger window of the Buick, a cruel spectacle like the public stranglings in Shanghai … He had learned nothing from the war because he expected nothing, like the Chinese peasants whom he now looted and shot.
At one point, Jim casually ranks the Chinese as being the lowest on his made-up bravery scale. Throughout the book, we see that Jim seems to regard the Chinese as poor warriors who don’t understand the war and can’t hope to. Jim’s impartial idea that you must be brave to be a good soldier is highlighted frequently throughout the novel.
They stared at the gates, which had rejected them for so many months and were now unguarded. Jim was sure that these starving Chinese, in their universe of death, were unable to grasp the meaning of an open gate.
Though for much of the book it seems that Jim, in his emotionless and naive way, has learnt to make the most of the war (and, to the annoyance of the adult prisoners, almost enjoy it), it is occasionally implied that his teenagehood is lonely after he is separated from his parents and friends. Jim clings onto memories and imagination, almost deliberately tricking himself into thinking that everything is and will be all right. Though these dreams are constantly shattered, Jim always manages to build them back up again as a childlike way of dealing with his traumatic situation.
Numbed by the sight of this dead pilot, Jim watched the youth’s knees slide into the water. … 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 had 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.
A very saddening and thought-provoking semi-autobiography presenting a new outlook on WWII through the eyes of a young boy.
Jim listened to the engines of the motorised junk as it moved down the canal, an ugly heart bearing the beat of its death across China, while immaculate generals masked their eyes with binoculars, calculating their astronomy of guns.