Introduction
“Empire of the Sun” is a 1984 novel by J. G. Ballard which was rewarded with the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Even though like Ballard’s previous short story, “The Dead Time,” issued in the anthology Myths of the Near Future, it is mostly fiction, like the prior story it sketches expansively on Ballard’s skills in World War II.
The novel narrates the story of an English boy, Jim Graham (just exactly as Ballard’s first and middle name: James Graham), who stays with his parents in Shanghai. After the Pearl Harbor assault, the Japanese occupy the International Settlement, and in the subsequent chaos, Jim appears disconnected from his parents.
For four months, Jim resists in a netherworld, searching for food in dumped houses, escaping slavery and death on his cycle. Gradually, he comprehends that the Japanese are his only defenders in China. And with the expectation of a blameless, Jim presents to the imprisonment camps. His estimation of the Japanese is hesitant. He esteems their bravery and is afraid of their brutality; he also recognizes that the Japanese are competent in sympathy toward kids. Actually, Jim has realized very early on that in a real conflict no one was informed which side Jim was on, and there were no flags or observers or conquerors. In a real war, there were no rivals. Though the Japanese are “legitimately” the opponents, Jim recognizes partially them, both as he respects the pilots with their grand mechanisms and because he senses that Lunghua is still a relatively secure location for him during those times.
Discussion
Towards the termination of the war, with the Japanese army collapsing, the food providing decreases essentially. Jim barely stays alive; around him, locals starving to death.
Yet this book is much more than the grainy narrative of a child’s amazing endurance in the severely familiar setting of World War II’s concentration camps. There is no melancholy for a good war here, no sappiness for the human strength at intense. Mr Ballard is more determined than romance generally permits. He aspires to render a vision of the disaster and thrives so well that it is able to hurt to reside upon his representations. For Mr Ballard appears to be against all armies and the principles that assemble troops; he appears also to consider that the repulsion of his youth terminated only when World War II started with a nuclear attack on Nagasaki.
In the second and third parts of the book, the author attains beyond the survivor’s guides that have appeared to be obligatory knowledge of the twentieth century. On one level, Jim grows for three years into an ingenious hostage who can survive in a world turned the wrong side up, studying how to stockpile food, bundle for favours and grovel to himself with the decent and immoral authorities of the campsite. But according to further examination, in the final period of the war, Jim is intelligent enough to distinguish the appearance of a new apparition of mass extermination.
In total control of his overwhelming substance, Mr Ballard is capable to suggest the panorama of the disaster and then forcing Jim into a real nightmarish. Here is the stink of the dead hoarded like wood, the salty taste of river water contaminated by dead bodies floating close to the shore, the strange singsong of peasants revealing their aggravation as they know they will be beaten to casualty. And here are sights that are not credible excluding that they sense completely real. Jim looks for teenage Kamikaze pilots who creep into their scruffy planes with no ceremonials other than the tired farewell of three other teenage warriors. He observes shallow tombs worsen, exposing bodies that entice the ravenous remains as meat. And in August 1945, after a death stride to the Olympic Stadium outside Shanghai, with the protectors and the hostages alike desperately desiring for the sleep of the dead, Jim observes what he distinguishes as the birth of a new domain of the sun that appropriates Japan’s setting star. In the sky to the northeast of Shanghai, he searches for a flash that temporarily overpowers the dawn and overflows the stadium with a strange light. Five hundred miles transversely the China Sea, Nagasaki has just been wept out by the atomic bomb.
Conclusion
It would be reassuring to note that Jim’s narration ends up happily when he finds his parents. He has endured the war by luck, and he has endured the end of the Japanese as canned food and powdered milk were plunged by the same type of American plane that dropped the bomb. Nevertheless, Jim is not convinced that the war is really finished. He is also not sure what kind of world is in his future as he leaves China. And with the understanding born of having essentially observed the possibility of Armageddon, the author has now bypassed on the estimation that his own survival, and the world’s, stay hesitant.
References
Ballard J.G. Empire of the Sun Buccaneer Books publisher. 1987.