Empire of the Sun

The story is a great look through a child's eyes at the WWII experience in Eastern China for British citizens captured by the Japanese. It goes from pre-war opulence to devastating prison camp existence to liberation.

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~]

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.

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.