Empire of the Sun

Rating:
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.

Rating:
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+

Rating:
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+