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Empire of the Sun (1984)

Brothers Judd Top 100 of the 20th Century: Novels (22)

    [A] flash of light filled the stadium, flaring over the stands in the south-west corner of the football
    field, as if an immense American bomb had exploded somewhere to the north-east of Shanghai.
    The sentry hesitated, looking over his shoulder as the light behind him grew more intense. It faded
    within a few seconds, but its pale sheen covered everything within the stadium, the looted furniture
    in the stands, the cars behind the goal posts, the prisoners on the grass. They were sitting on the
    floor of a furnace heated by a second sun.
        -Empire of the Sun

Time was when the great war books were written either by the combatants themselves or by historians. But it is uniquely the case of WWII--and uniquely a function of the fact that it was truly a "World" war--that two of the greatest, and certainly the most affecting, works of literature to emerge from the war relate the experiences of children. Anne Frank's Diary, though the War itself is necessarily off stage, is informed by our knowledge of its events, and her perilous situation is a result of the War. In Empire of the Sun, our young hero--Jamie, later Jim--is thrust into the very midst of war, and, though he's rarely in the middle of combat, the killing and other horrors (even down to the A-bombing of Japan, which gives the book its unexpected meaning) occur all around him.

J. G. Ballard has drawn upon his own four years in the Lunghua Civilian Assembly Center, near Japanese occupied Shanghai, the imaginative and visual techniques of his science fiction writing, the heritage of such writers as Charles Dickens and Mark Twain, and a dark, but accurate, personal vision of WWII as little more than a prelude to WWIII, to create a novel that captures the bloody-minded nature of the 20th Century as no other author has. Particularly impressive is the way in which he shows that, for young Jamie, the War is, perversely, something of a liberation, freeing him from the normal strictures of the adult world. He's kind of like Huck Finn lighting out for the Territories, but in his case there's not even a runaway slave for a companion.

Ballard is also very conscious of the way in which modern media has served to minimize reality, or at least to distance us from it. After the War ends, Jim is watching newsreels and realizes that they are part of what will become the accepted version of events, with arrows sweeping across continents, while the true life experiences of people like him will take on the quality of illusions. In turn, Ballard makes many of the scenes almost hallucinatory or surreal (it's hard to convey just how visual the novel is; suffice it to say that it is so cinematic that even Steven Spielberg made a reasonably satisfying movie version out of it.)

Ultimately, it is Jim's triumph, and China's, to have survived WWII. It is the tragedy of the Century that, just as Jim was liberated by the fact that the world had come untethered from the normal rules of a civil society, monstrous forces of human nature were also freed, leading to death, murder, torture, and destruction on a scale which called into question whether the species could, would, or should survive. As the novel closes and he heads to England to complete school, Jim seems uncertain whether he'll survive WWIII, but positive that China, prostrate for so long, will wreak a horrible vengeance upon the world. Though this intuition has so far proven wrong, it is nonetheless true that tens of millions of Chinese were subsequently killed by their own government, which today is another Empire of the Sun, with nuclear weapons pointed at the rest of the world.

This novel comes as close as any can to summing up what was one of the central themes of the 20th Century : The Slaughter of the Innocents. Jim is in many ways the archetypal hero of the age, a worthwhile representative of those who survived the Slaughter. Anne Frank, tragically, represents all those who did not.

(Reviewed:27-May-01)

Grade: (A+)

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Empire of the Sun (1984)

Brothers Judd Top 100 of the 20th Century: Novels (22)

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