Peter Kemp's review of J. G. Ballard's Empire of the Sun was
published in the TLS of September 14, 1984.
Truth, J. G. Ballard’s new novel, Empire of the Sun, seems designed to show,
is often stranger even than science fiction. Set in and around Shanghai in
the turbulent years between Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima, and drawing closely
on Ballard’s own experiences during that time, the book explores a world
light-years away from that of conventional war fiction, so much so that when
Jim, its young hero, reads accounts of military manoeuvres in Reader’s
Digests disgorged from American relief planes he feels “they described an
heroic adventure on another planet”, something “a universe away” from the
war he’s known. Apparently representing a change of direction in Ballard’s
writing, Empire of the Sun – with its panoramas of dereliction, its focusing
on extremity and the dehumanized – also suggests why he should previously
have found apocalyptic science fiction so congenial a genre.
While remaining naturalistic, Empire of the Sun chronicles the outlandish. To
begin with – and to end with (the novel opens and closes with vivid, packed
evocations of the city) – there is Shanghai, the book’s bizarre setting: a
grotesque conglomeration of squalor and swagger, garden parties and public
stranglings, pampered expatriates and starving natives. Chauffeured in their
Buicks and Cadillacs, European colonials glide through mobs of shiny-suited
Chinese gangsters, pimps and touts and peasants, beggars rattling Craven A
tins, and misshapen rickshaw coolies with “veins as thick as fingers
clenched into the meat of their swollen calves”. Street scenes sizzle with
pungent immediacy as pavement vendors fry gobbets of snake or bean curd in
peanut oil, Eurasian prostitutes in ankle-length fur coats whistle through
their teeth at men emerging from the hotels. The lopsided extravaganza of
the place is epitomized in the mustering of two hundred hunchbacks from its
slums to stand in medieval costume around the Cathay Theatre – the world’s
largest cinema – as a publicity stunt for the premiere of The Hunchback of
Notre Dame.
Ballard’s sharpest attention falls on the city’s International Settlement
where, in the days leading up to Pearl Harbor, colonial life fecklessly and
recklessly has its final fling. Amid the limousines and leisure of this
still-neutral zone, the struggle in Europe largely features as just another
facet of recreation: the war effort is fuelled by bottles of whisky cheerily
raffled at dances. Even when catastrophe strikes and the Japanese take over,
this playtime mentality persists – evident in the luggage the prisoners tote
into captivity: “Having spent the years of peace on the tennis courts and
cricket fields of the Far East, they confidently expected to pass the years
of war in the same way. Dozens of tennis racquets hung from the suitcase
handles; there were cricket bats and fishing rods, and even a set of golf
clubs.”
These expectations are soon bowled over in the camps – as are readers’
traditional assumptions. Ballard’s account of incarceration teems
informatively with the unexpected. Now that anarchy rages in Shanghai, the
Europeans find the Japanese their protectors as well as their oppressors, a
military shield between them and the desperate, destitute Chinese: “How
would they survive”, Jim worries of his fellow-prisoners as the war ends,
“without the Japanese to look after them?” Getting into a camp is, it often
transpires, more difficult than getting out, and appreciably safer.
Heightening the book’s unfamiliar angle on things is the fact that its
narrative viewpoint is that of a young boy – only eleven years old when the
action starts. Separated from his parents as the Japanese attack, Jim finds
he has to fend for himself over four arduous years. Initially – in thrall to
“the stern morality of the Chums Annuals” – he defies the invaders and leads
an outlaw-like existence in the deserted residences of the International
Settlement, subsisting on olives and cocktail biscuits as water ebbs from
once-gleaming swimming pools and clipped lawns revert to wilderness. Then,
as Shanghai gets ever more murderous, he learns that survival necessitates
surrender. By considerable effort, he escapes into a camp.
With steady, unsettling skill, Ballard recounts the routines here. Enormities
are dispassionately retailed: the violence, the diseases and the
malnutrition. Tormented by flies and mosquitoes, sick and famished prisoners
fumble through their feed for the bonus of a few weevils to provide protein.
Developing uncommon sense, Jim discovers “how important it was to be
obsessed by food”, that “it was probably sensible to do anything to
survive”. Helping others when possible, he still takes it for granted that,
like him, they will always, in extremity, put themselves first. Not that
quite all do this. Though devoid of military heroics, the book does record
some civilian heroism: a hard-pressed doctor resourcefully helps Jim stay
alive, as does an altruistic Dutch woman. In keeping with the book’s
emphasis on the self-absorption and matter-of-fact acceptance of the
appalling generated by conditions in the camp, Jim’s attention touches only
fleetingly on subsequent disasters befalling these benefactors. The doctor,
it’s revealed in passing, has been blinded in one eye. Mrs Hug, the Dutch
woman, is treated with even more arresting casualness: dropping out of sight
as Jim has to cope with the rigours of camp life, she re-enters the
narrative with stark brevity as a wrist-bone poking out of a makeshift grave.
Starting the book surrounded by balsa-wood bombers and Pathé newsreels that
glossily film over the facts, Jim is soon taught the flimsiness of these
simplified models of war. In reality, he finds, mess – physical and
psychological – predominates. Confusion is the only clear factor. Ambiguity
lies everywhere. There are no dependable dividing-lines between allies and
enemies: savagery can come from a torture-crazed British soldier as well as
from prison guards; sometimes treated with generosity by the Japanese, he is
most persistently persecuted by the English family with whom he has to share
a room.
Amid this welter of wartime chaos, Ballard powerfully places surreal or
emblematic tableaux: Shanghai’s river, the Yangtze, constantly awash with a
“regatta of corpses” as dozens of paper-garlanded coffins, launched by those
too poor to buy a burial, swing backwards and forwards on its tides;
skeletal European prisoners expiring in an Olympic stadium whose tiers are
heaped with de luxe detritus looted from their homes - refrigerators,
cocktail cabinets, roulette wheels. Excelling at building up large-scale,
eerily resonant scenes like these, Ballard also shows a flair for the
effectively weighty single line: “The hospital patients lay across each
other like rolls of carpet.” His prose – imaginatively catching features
such as prisoners’ “sunburnt but pallid faces like bleached leather from
which the dye had run” – is as full of energy as his subjects are
increasingly drained of it.
Empire of the Sun is infused with images of light. Shanghai tawdrily glints
with neon and sheen. The steely glitter of the forces of the Rising Sun is
set against Western colonial eclipse. Lights flash from bayonets or the
undercarriage of aircraft. Flames flicker from gunboat turrets. The most
lurid lighting in the book, however, is the lethal gleam of the Hiroshima
bomb, registered by Jim even across the four hundred miles of the China Sea.
Throwing an especially searing light on things, this is the intense core of
Empire of the Sun, a novel that not only brilliantly illuminates aspects of
the war in the Far East, but also offers piercing pictures of human
capability.
