Empire of the Sun by J.G. Ballard

Nothing can be so revealing and honest as a glimpse of the world through the eyes of a child, without the filter that adulthood and cultural expectations provide. J.G.Ballard is entirely successful in capturing that point of view in this novel, probably because this is a semi-autobiographical fictional account of his experiences when he was himself a child.

Eleven-year-old Jim is living with his English parents in Shanghai, China, when Pearl Harbor is bombed and the American and English residents officially become the enemies of the Japanese, who are already established there, having previously conquered the Chinese. Separated from his parents, young Jim lives for a time by breaking into deserted European residences and eating all the food left, before being seemingly befriended by a pair of American merchant seamen, who try to sell him. Eventually surrendering to the Japanese, he finds himself to be safest and happiest in an internment camp. When the atomic bombs fall and the war in over, Jim finds that World War II may be over but that World War III has begun, as China falls into the chaos of bandits, Chinese Nationalists, and Chinese Communists. He realizes that he longs for the haven of the internment camp and the Japanese.

Even though the experiences recounted here are not identical to Ballard's--he was indeed interned, but with his parents--one wonders if he still shares the feelings of Jim, about whom it is said, "Poor fellow, you'll never believe the war is over."

It is the honesty of Ballard in his characterization of Jim that this novel rises to the extraordinary and becomes real. His Jim is neither a helpless victim nor a self-sacrificing hero, but a realistic child with a survival instinct which drives him to ingratiate himself to whomever offers the most benefits. He is even puzzled by the self-sacrificial actions of one of his fellow internees. He behaves as I would expect a real-life resourceful child to behave who is without supervision and placed in brutal circumstances.

An award-winning movie was made of this novel many years ago. As I remember it, the movie was much more focused on the action and presented a much more heroic picture of the boy Jim. In contrast, the focus of this novel is on people and how they react to the chaos of war, which is most often in a survival-of-the-fittest manner without the patina of modern civilized behavior.

One last observation: This book was written in 1984 about the author's memories of 1941-45, and includes on its last page this statement: "One day China would punish the rest of the world and take a frightening revenge." Now that's chilling.

All in all, a very interesting book.