A review by calwhimsey
Empire of the Sun, by J. G. Ballard
5.0
The novel recounts the experience of WW2 reality in and around Shanghai of a young boy Jim, the son of well-off British expats in China. The story has an autobiographical basis embellished with fiction. As such, it captures some incredibly valuable memories of wartime, something that needs to be read over and over again. And despite not being a factually precise memoir, it does not, in my opinion, stray far from a kind of truth — one that perhaps comprises a lot more than facts ever could.
This is an excursion into the bleak reality of a war-torn world, where the structures and certainties of peaceful time crumble away, and where everyone is left to fend for themselves. How do years of such chaos reflect on the psyche of a young, perceptive boy? The story is an account of the omnipresence of death, its acceptance as a daily occurrence, as something imminent and acutely relatable. How could a wartime child, a survivor by the grace of fellow prisoners’ kindness and self-sacrifice as much as his own innocent resourcefulness, carry on in a post-war world? How could he ever undo the ultimate demoralization the wartime years carried out on him? The novel does a tremendous job hinting at these questions in-between the lines focused on young Jim’s experiences.
This is an excursion into the bleak reality of a war-torn world, where the structures and certainties of peaceful time crumble away, and where everyone is left to fend for themselves. How do years of such chaos reflect on the psyche of a young, perceptive boy? The story is an account of the omnipresence of death, its acceptance as a daily occurrence, as something imminent and acutely relatable. How could a wartime child, a survivor by the grace of fellow prisoners’ kindness and self-sacrifice as much as his own innocent resourcefulness, carry on in a post-war world? How could he ever undo the ultimate demoralization the wartime years carried out on him? The novel does a tremendous job hinting at these questions in-between the lines focused on young Jim’s experiences.