Empire of the Sun

Part II

20: Lunghua Camp

21: The Cubicle

22: The University of Life

23: The Air Raid

24: The Hospital

25: The Cemetery Garden

26: The Lunghua Sophomores

27: The Execution

28: An Escape

29: The March to Nantao

30: The Olympic Stadium

31: The Empire of the Sun

Part III

32: The Eurasian

33: The Kamikaze Pilot

34: The Refrigerator in the Sky

35: Lieutenant Price

36: The Flies

37: A Reserved Room

38: The Road to Shanghai

39: The Bandits

40: The Fallen Airmen

41: Rescue Mission

Part IV

42: The Terrible City

An Investigative Spirit

The End of My War

About the Author

By the same author

About the Publisher

Introduction (#u66fab762-e52f-569a-9e28-e43f3fca4736)

BY John Lanchester

When Empire of the Sun was published in 1984, it had a huge and double impact. The first part of this consisted of the effect on its author’s reputation. J. G. Ballard turned fifty-four that year, and had published nine novels and more than a dozen short-story collections. He was regarded as a known quantity: an admired writer, and also the kind of writer who has fans. That implies a passionate, but perhaps rather narrow readership. He was seen as a writer of science fiction – an unhelpfully broad term, and one which perhaps puts off more people than it puts on. When I interviewed Ballard at his home in Shepperton in 1987, en route to writing about his novel The Day of Creation, he specifically asked me not to describe it as a work of science fiction, because that was a limiting and compartmentalizing description. Even those of us who loved his work could see why it didn’t have mass-market appeal. The sentences were clear, the images vivid, but the strangeness of the worlds he described was all the more pronounced for that. The normals out there would never be able to handle Ballard. We fans loved him all the more because of that.

And then came Empire of the Sun. In place of the mysterious dreamscapes we had come to expect, it was a largely realist, autobiographically inspired novel about growing up in wartime Shanghai. The new book seemed to explain and contextualize the earlier work. It had an immediate success, not just for its own merits, but also because the wider public suddenly had a key to Ballard’s oeuvre. Ballard’s worlds, for instance, 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.

Ballard was born in Shanghai in 1930 and lived there until 1946. In the pre-war years, Shanghai had a claim to be the most interesting and also the strangest city in the world. The greater part of China had fallen under control of the Japanese following their invasion in 1937. The subjugation of China was brutal, and saw some of the twentieth century’s worst atrocities, most famously in what became known as the Rape of Nanking. Shanghai, however, was partially exempt from the mayhem. Inside the city was the International Settlement, an area forcibly seceded from Chinese control by the treaties which brought an end to the nineteenth-century opium wars. The International Settlement, which was free from Chinese laws and Chinese rule, had a population of more than 1 million Chinese. When the Japanese invaded, the army stopped short of overrunning the settlement, no doubt on the basis that it would have constituted a declaration of war against the Allies. Instead the Japanese army waited until Pearl Harbor before launching their attack. The story of what happened next is told in Empire of the Sun, which balances a highly personal and partly fictionalized account of the narrator’s experiences with a careful and accurate use of the real historical framework.

A number of themes that run through Ballard’s work are crystallised in Empire of the Sun. All his novels give a powerful sense that 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 isn’t a benign, Humean or Buddhist sense that reality is an illusion. It’s much more pressing than that. In Ballard’s novels, any apparently settled reality is prone to be dissolved and reconfigured. In Empire of the Sun, the process is prefigured on the very first page. ‘At night the same silent films seemed to flicker against the wall of his bedroom in Amherst Avenue, and transformed his sleeping mind into a deserted newsreel theatre.’ The real images and the mediated images blur into each other. ‘The whole of Shanghai was turning into a newsreel leaking from inside his head.’ And then, when the war does finally break out, the slide from the old reality into the new one is figured memorably: a Gone with the Wind poster of Atlanta on fire blends into the real, burning Shanghai. ‘Chinese carpenters were cutting down the panels of painted smoke that rose high into the Shanghai sky, barely distinguishable from the fires still lifting above the tenements of the Old City, where Kuomintang irregulars had resisted the Japanese invasion.’ The image of a city in flames has become reality. For the next 300 pages, reality is never stable, and Jim is never safe, not for a moment.

This world, like all of Ballard’s worlds, is full of images which hover on the edge of being symbols. The young Jim is fascinated by everything to do with aviation, especially military aviation. He has detailed real-world knowledge of all the different types of Allied and Japanese aircraft. He has good reason to be interested, as is painfully clear to the reader, but at the same time the planes and their pilots are also symbols of escape and freedom, worlds beyond the horrors of Shanghai. All Ballard’s books have something like that, a piece of reality which is also a piece of dreamscape: the underwater city of The Drowned World, the tower block of High-Rise, the river of The Day of Creation. There had always been a strong sense of psychic pressure in Ballard’s work, a powerful force of feeling behind these insistent images. Now we readers felt we knew where those feelings were coming from.

The tone of Ballard’s fiction also seemed more explicable. His work had always featured images of extraordinary power recounted with a consciously flat affect. His narrators – heroes is definitely not quite the right word – see extraordinary, unprecedented things, but never let on. It’s a rule of actors playing in a farce never to signal that they know what’s happening is funny. Ballard’s characters follow an inversion of that rule: especially when confronted by horrors, they 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. Consider the flotilla of coffins floated on the Yangtze River every night. The coffins are surrounded by paper flowers. ‘Jim disliked this regatta of corpses. In the rising sunlight the paper petals resembled the coils of viscera strewn around the terrorist bomb victims in the Nanking Road.’ No eleven-year-old should have that in his head: not the coffins, not the terrorism, and not the viscera. The novel is full of such sights. ‘Looking at the glove, Jim realized that it was the complete skin from one of the petty officer’s hands, boiled off the flesh in an engine-room fire.’

Linked to the sense of horror is a sense of abandonment. Jim is living in a world without safety and authority and love; a world without parents. In reality, Ballard had his parents with him in the internment camp. As it happens, my godfather, Bill Stewart, was interned in the same camp, and made this point forcefully. ‘I knew James Ballard,’ he said, referring to the writer’s father. ‘It wasn’t a bit like that.’ But that misses the point: the point is what it felt like. In the camps, there was nothing parents could do to help their children. Survival was at the whim of the Japanese. Children knew that. In Empire of the Sun, the parents are absent because in real life, they felt completely absent. The sense of abandonment is total. ‘He felt a strange lightness in his head, not because his parents had rejected him, but because he expected them to do so, and no longer cared.’

All of these things came together in Empire of the Sun: the sense of reality as a stage set, potent imagery pressing on the edge of symbolism, the horrors and the flat affect. Almost overnight, Ballard’s reputation changed. His admirers had always felt that his work had a strong sense of imaginative truth; now we had a greater sense of why.

The transformative impact of Empire of the Sun on Ballard’s reputation is only part of the reason why it is such an important book. It also has a claim to be the best English novel about the Second World War. The book dramatizes the sheer geographical and world-historical sweep of the war. The immense casualness with which Jim regards death is very powerful, but also – a greater horror – thoroughly representative. He is a child of the war and his terrible familiarity with death is, in this context, normal. The typical combatant in the twentieth century’s wars, for the first time in human history, was not a combatant at all, but a civilian. Jim’s story captures that truth.

It captures other things too, among the most vivid the sense of total chaos around the war. The history of war is usually told in terms of battles, of more or less clearcut conflicts, of front lines and rearguard actions, of advances and retreats. For the people living through it though, especially for civilians, war is much more chaotic and formless and fluid and unpredictable. Jim could lose his life at almost any moment: he knows it so well he has accepted the fact. The ungoverned landscape around Shanghai, lawless and lethal, is a typical twentieth-century place. My grandparents were in Hong Kong when it fell to the Japanese (my father having been evacuated to Australia), and my grandmother would sometimes talk about the time just afterwards, and also the time immediately after the end of the war. The overwhelming impression given by her stories was one of anarchy and chaos, and the only text I’ve ever read that catches that flavour is Empire of the Sun.

There is a broader truthfulness to the novel too. As well as being the story of Jim and Lunghua internment camp and Shanghai, and the undertold reality of civilian war, it’s also a story about the future. One of the most heartbreaking moments in the book comes when Jim interprets the chaotic ending of the Second World War as being the outbreak of the third. ‘He was sure now that the Second World War had ended, but had World War III begun?’ To make it more painful, Jim isn’t necessarily wrong. The second half of the century didn’t see a world war, but it did see a world that was almost constantly at war somewhere or other. In Empire of the Sun everything is swept away, everything is going to change: Jim knows it, and the reader knows it too. The novel figures the end of the British Empire, and the first glimmerings of the Asian century, the Chinese century, through which we are just now beginning to live. ‘The war had changed the Chinese people – the villagers, the wandering coolies and lost puppet soldiers looked at Europeans in a way Jim had never seen before the war, as if they no longer existed.’ It’s a novel about a profound historical pivot, a fundamental change of global orientation, and it’s told through the eyes of a child in an internment camp.

London, 2014

Empire of the Sun draws on my experiences in Shanghai, China, during the Second World War, and in Lunghua C.A.C. (Civilian Assembly Centre) where I was interned from 1942–45. For the most part this novel is based on events I observed during the Japanese occupation of Shanghai and within the camp at Lunghua.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor took place on Sunday morning, 7 December 1941, but as a result of time differences across the Pacific Date Line it was then already the morning of Monday, 8 December in Shanghai.

J. G. Ballard

Part I (#u66fab762-e52f-569a-9e28-e43f3fca4736)

1 (#u66fab762-e52f-569a-9e28-e43f3fca4736)