Empire of the Sun

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Summary: About loneliness and death?
Review: A beautiful and terrible book, Empire of the Sun has become one of mine preferred. After the attack to Pearl Harbour, the Japanese invaded South-Est Asia. Thousands of European civilians, women and children, couldn't escape and were interned by Japanese. A lot of them died from disease and starvation. James Ballard, the author, was one of those children. Living in Shanghai with his family, eleven years old, he was interned till the end of the war in the Lunghua camp. Jim, the protagonist of the novel, is the `alter ego' of the writer, so the story is quite autobiographic.
Shanghai is seized by Japanese and in an apocalyptic try to escape, Jim, born in a rich British family, become separated from his parents and must fight alone to survive. He will be soon prisoner of Japanese and will be interned till the end of the war, spending the years from childhood to adolescence in the internment camp. The war, that overwhelms everything and everybody, is reported from the point of view of the boy in a raw and shocking way, nothing is saved from the corruption caused by war.
Shanghai is a hell's city, where thousands Chinese people lead a life without hope, oppressed first by Europeans and then by Japanese. Jim spends a life of absolute loneliness, not able to have a true relationship with other people. Obsessed by the primordial necessity of food, he become a `disgusting boy' ready to do everything to survive, even to steal the food from other European prisoners, or to become the slave of a small criminal without scruples. Jim looks with a corrosive eye and black umor at the life of the European prisoners. With their body destroyed by disease and starvation, they loose any hope and lead a life made of baseness and small egoism. Leave alone to cope with the ruin of his life, Jim will find a refuge in a world of dreams, populated by the myth of Japanese aviators. Jim feels himself close to the Japanese kamikazes for their bravery, but especially for their loneliness and sadness. His dreams will allow him to survive till the end of the war. At the end the only life that he knows will be the life in the camp, and when this will end also his world of dreams will collapse marking the end of his childhood. By now an adolescent without any hope, Jim will wander an apocalyptic landscape, almost crazy from starvation, welcoming the death as liberation, but he will survive. The death is an obsessive presence in every page of the book, bodies, devastated by flies, are every where and the air is saturated by smell of decomposition. In my opinion this story is one of the most important documents about the atrocity of wars in the twentieth century. For its strong and shocking message against the war this is a book without time and I think that will be read also by future generations.

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Summary: Intriguing account of boy's life amidst war and devastation
Review: Empire of the Sun, by J.G. Ballard, is the poignant, unsettling story of Jim, a British boy living in Shanghai whose life is altered beyond recognition by the Japanese invasion of China during World War II. The book begins in the winter of 1941, as Jim, a carefree eleven-year-old, and his wealthy parents attend high-class Christmas parties with other foreigners who have prospered in Shanghai. The only life that the inventive, intelligent boy knows is one of luxury and privilege, hardly touched by the war in Europe. Everything changes after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Suddenly the Japanese soldiers that have long been a fixture on the Shanghai streets are forcefully, uncompromisingly rounding up foreigners and sending them to military prisons. Separated from his parents, Jim wanders through Shanghai until he "surrenders" to the Japanese and finds himself in a squalid, disease-ridden detainment center and eventually in Lunghua camp, his home for the next three years.
The book is based on the author's experiences in a Chinese interment camp from 1942 until 1945. Ballard has an incredible talent for articulating Jim's perspective and describing how the protagonist changes from an adventurous boy in a school uniform to an emaciated, resilient, thoughtful (and still adventurous) young man who desperately tries to make sense of the world. In Empire of the Sun, Ballard pointedly recounts the squalor, disease and starvation of the camp just as Jim sees them. While Jim quickly becomes immune to the sight of such things - along with constant the death, murder, and beatings - the reader remains deeply affected. Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects is how Jim comes to rely on the camp because there he can build his own little universe amidst the absurdity of the world. Empire of the Sun is an arresting, shocking, frequently comical book that won't leave the reader unchanged.

Rating:
Summary: Has its moments--but also its flaws.
Review: Everyone else seems to love this book so much that they either didn't notice, or chose not to mention, its significant flaws. Yes, the details are graphic and accurate, and yes, you feel like you are there, and yes, the prose has its occasional shining moments.

However, through probably the first 3/4 of the book, the protagonist Jim is nearly a completely unsympathetic character. He has little, if any, feeling for anyone other than himself. His parents and friends are distant, shallowly sketched characters who never truly come alive. His sole concern is for his own welfare. He observes many of the brutal events in the book with an appalling lack of concern. (And don't tell me that this can be excused because he's "only a child". Some children are more affectionate and caring than others, but of the many I've met--even the ones who have been neglected or abused--few are such cold fish as Jim). In fact, he effortlessly falls into the role of a hyena-like scavenger among his fellow prisoners, waiting and wishing for each one to die and then robbing their corpses of whatever he can. In one particularly repulsive sequence, he takes food rightfully belonging to a dying British soldier without making any effort to help him, and watches impartially as the soldier dies. He rationalizes this as being "survival of the fittest" and that helping other people would only mean his own death, but his excuses ring hollow to this reader's ear. He ingratiates himself as much as he can with the Japanese, and befriends a manipulative con man who uses him as a servant and a source of profit. While he bemoans the attitude of the British in the camps, and views the suffering Chinese outside the camp as less than human, he never turns a critical eye on the people who hurt and use him; instead he likes and respects them. I found that rather sickening. Toward the end of the book he does display some sort of feeling of responsibility, but compared with his behavior throughout most of the book, it's too little, too late, to gain my sympathy.

Also, the author's interruptions in the story, and his frequent contradictions, make it confusing to read at times. In one scene, Jim is so sick from hunger that he can barely stand without being dizzy; a few seconds later he's running and jumping over fences (and it's the same scene). Another example: he often says he dislikes Dr. Ransome, though he never really explains why (except that the doctor reminds him of a rugby master), and then he suddenly expresses feelings of concern for the doctor's fate that seem all out of character. If some crisis sparked a change of heart in Jim, it hasn't been articulated well enough for the reader to recognize. And the doctor is portrayed as someone who pretends to care about his patients but, Jim suspects, is devious and more concerned with himself than he lets on. Jim continues to believe this, despite very little evidence to prove it (the doctor drank more water than he should have in one scene; he hoarded potatoes from dead patients in another. Yet, he tirelessly works to improve the lot of all the sick people in the camp all through the book, and he feeds Jim on many occasions.) There is no revelation of the doctor's character as being false, yet Jim clings to his theory until the end of the book, where he suddenly changes his mind with no reason whatsoever. Such contradictions lie throughout the book, clouding characterization.

Also, fans of gore would disagree with me, but there were so many scenes of death and bloodshed in the book that I became tired of reading long gruesome descriptions which seemed included merely to be long and gruesome and say, "Isn't war awful?" As if we don't know it is already. Keeping it down to the minimum necessary to advance the plot would have made the book more effective. Pages and pages of horrible deaths merely harden the reader (I found myself skipping pages just to get on with the rest of the story). Whereas a few well-chosen violent scenes would have been all that was necessary to evoke the chaotic world of wartime China. I compare this narrative to Nevil Shute's fictional "A Town Like Alice", where the Japanese violence was only demonstrated a few times, yet the overtones of fear were palpable throughout the entire part of the narrative that was set during the war.

So, while I agree that this book has its occasional fine moments, as other reviewers have already pointed out, because of excessive gore, uneven storytelling and the lack of a sympathetic main character, it doesn't quite reach the level of greatness. I give it three stars for its sometimes poetic moments.

Rating:
Summary: Horrifying
Review: It can only be described as miraculous that Ballard survived what he wrote about in this thinly-disguised autobiography. At least twice he nearly starved to death. One of the ways he did survive
was to detach himself from all of the horrors he witnessed--disease, starvation, murder, executions. And he was all of 11 years old. Yet, watching an interview with Ballard on TV once, he said, for all of what he went through, he rather still enjoyed himself, saying that he thrived on change. This book is simply amazing. It is relentingly horrifying, though.

Rating:
Summary: Great Book!
Review: J.G. Ballard wrote this semi-autobiographical novel, or fictionalized memoir (whatever genre it fits into)about his boyhood in China during the Second World War. He witnesses world-altering events as he is transformed from a rich little schoolboy into a street rat, surviving separation from his parents, near-starvation, illness, imprisonment and hideous emotional trauma. Jim overcomes all of this because he is smart and opportunistic, but he never loses his humanity, and he never becomes bitter.

This is also an interesting glimpse into the expatriate British (or Western) community in China during the war. It made me realize that there's a lot about WWII I don't know much about.

Ballard is a master story teller, no matter how much of this is factual and how much is part of his subjective memories.

I would highly recommend this book to any high school student studying 20th Century history. The Spielberg movie is good, too, but this book has so much more depth and texture.

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Summary: Numbed by War
Review: J.G. Ballard's very unique, and especially trying, childhood is detailed in this autobiographical novel that offers powerful insights into war and history. Ballard, represented by "Jim" here, was a pre-teen living with his British expatriate parents in Shanghai on the eve of World War II. When war reached the city, Jim was separated from his parents and spent the next three years in a Japanese internment camp, learning to fend for himself under the most brutal conditions. Thus Ballard's distinct life experience leads to one of the most fascinating and terrifying stories you are likely to find on the horrors and miseries of war. Jim is so preoccupied with survival that he describes the most outlandish horrors with bland matter-of-fact understatement, including multitudes of corpses floating in rivers, scores of his fellow prisoners dying of starvation and disease, public executions, and even watching human bones being made into concrete. Along the way, the human psychological factors of war are revealed as Jim grows apart from his parents, loses affinity for his own countrymen, identifies with his oppressors, and wishes for the war to continue so he doesn't have to face the unknown future. Through Ballard's powerful writing, we can see exactly why Jim (and the young Ballard in real life) would reach these states of mind. This story also offers many intuitions on the futile nature of war itself, as shifting loyalties and factionalism blur the lines between friend and foe, and post-war anarchy becomes even more dangerous than the actual war. These are all hugely enlightening insights into war from a man who experienced it himself in a very distinct way. [~doomsdayer520~]

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Summary: Page turner
Review: My friend recommended this book to me because I'd read the color purple so she thought I'd like it. I did! The books about a young boy who is abandoned in Shanghi during world war II. The events that follow the boy through finding himself alone and to eventually, being held in a prison of war camp by the Japanese are breath-taking. Some parts of the book were a little drawn out for my liking but all in all, this is a great book for your collection.

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Summary: Not what you expect
Review: This is an account of JG Ballard's childhood in Shanghai during World War II when he was imprisoned in an internment camp away from his parents but just knowing that alone tells you nothing about the book. Yes, it takes place in WWII but that's almost irrelevant to the book, Jim is barely aware of the war as far as most people would conceive it and the entire war seems to take place mostly on the periphery . . . if it doesn't affect him directly than he doesn't care. On one level this is a nicely detailed account of life in Shanghai, especially in the beginning. Ballard is a good enough writer that he can describe such mundane events with enough flair that they take on another ambiance entirely. This becomes more pronounced as Jim winds deeper into the war itself, with the book becoming almost dream like in its quality. A lot of people I think object to the actions of Jim, which are very much what we don't expect. He's fairly self centered and makes a lot of weird rationalizations but I had no trouble understanding his POV, even if I didn't totally agree with it. He's a kid caught in something he can barely understand, so he has to break it down into something he can understand and sometimes that means making it a game and sometimes that means doing some things that most of us would interpret as cruel. That was the most interesting part of the novel for me, watching Jim trying to cope with the events around him, deal with the fact that he can barely remember his parents, with the fact that the only life he can really remember after a while are in the camp itself. With everything filtered through his perceptions the reader has to evaluate for him or herself what exactly the truth is . . . Jim's perception of some characters can change over and over, or maybe not even agree with what the character is doing, but that's because he's looking at it through the eyes of a child and by way of Jim, so is the reader as well. The white flash of the atom bomb that comes toward the end isn't even a climax, it's just another strange event in a war where everything strange is normal and for Jim it doesn't even signify the end of the war, for him the war never really seems to end. Haunting in its grim depiction of reality, this stands as one of the better books to come out about WWII simply for its personal perspective.

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Summary: A harrowing coming-of-age story
Review: While captioned a novel, J. G. Ballard's Empire of the Sun is very much a true life memoir. In this book (made into a film by Steven Spielberg), Ballard first tells the life of a boy ("Jim") in pre-Pearl Harbor Shanghai, the privileged young son of an English business executive. When the war begins, Jim and his parents are separated, and Jim survives for weeks on his own, living of the food left in his and his neighbors' abandoned mansions. Most of the book is set in the Lunghua prison camp, where Jim is forced to grow up under circumstances no boy should endure. Finally, the war ends, and he is reunited with his parents under the shadow of nascent Chinese communism. Ballard tells a compelling story, and pulls no punches. Much of what Jim experiences is shocking, and Ballard neither embellishes nor understates Jim's experiences. Flies, death, and decomposition are everywhere, as are avarice and (occasionally) kindness. This is a very different "coming of age" story, but one I thing a high-schooler would enjoy. (Query: Ballard assumes from his reader a fairly good grounding in World War II and cold war history, which I have. I understand that many young people lack such knowledge. Would such young people understand and appreciate Ballard's story and artistry? I don't know). I suspect this book will be read and recommended for many years to come.

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Summary: the slaughter of the innocents
Review: [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. -Empire of the Sun

Time was when the great war books were written either by the combatants themselves or by historians. But it is uniquely the case of WWII--and uniquely a function of the fact that it was truly a "World" war--that two of the greatest, and certainly the most affecting, works of literature to emerge from the war relate the experiences of children. Anne Frank's Diary, though the War itself is necessarily off stage, is informed by our knowledge of its events, and her perilous situation is a result of the War. In Empire of the Sun, our young hero--Jamie, later Jim--is thrust into the very midst of war, and, though he's rarely in the middle of combat, the killing and other horrors (even down to the A-bombing of Japan, which gives the book its unexpected meaning) occur all around him.

J. G. Ballard has drawn upon his own four years in the Lunghua Civilian Assembly Center, near Japanese occupied Shanghai, the imaginative and visual techniques of his science fiction writing, the heritage of such writers as Charles Dickens and Mark Twain, and a dark, but accurate, personal vision of WWII as little more than a prelude to WWIII, to create a novel that captures the bloody-minded nature of the 20th Century as no other author has. Particularly impressive is the way in which he shows that, for young Jamie, the War is, perversely, something of a liberation, freeing him from the normal strictures of the adult world. He's kind of like Huck Finn lighting out for the Territories, but in his case there's not even a runaway slave for a companion.

Ballard is also very conscious of the way in which modern media has served to minimize reality, or at least to distance us from it. After the War ends, Jim is watching newsreels and realizes that they are part of what will become the accepted version of events, with arrows sweeping across continents, while the true life experiences of people like him will take on the quality of illusions. In turn, Ballard makes many of the scenes almost hallucinatory or surreal (it's hard to convey just how visual the novel is; suffice it to say that it is so cinematic that even Steven Spielberg made a reasonably satisfying movie version out of it.)

Ultimately, it is Jim's triumph, and China's, to have survived WWII. As the novel closes and he heads to England to complete school, Jim seems uncertain whether he'll survive WWIII, but positive that China, prostrate for so long, will wreak a horrible vengeance upon the world. This novel comes as close as any can to summing up what was one of the central themes of the 20th Century : The Slaughter of the Innocents. Jim is in many ways the archetypal hero of the age, a worthwhile representative of those who survived the Slaughter. Anne Frank, tragically, represents all those who did not.

GRADE : A+