I finished Empire Of The Sun by JG Ballard yesterday, and it’s safe to say that it blew me away. It truly is an exceptional book, in turns moving and funny, with deep and light moments throughout.

The coverline is a quote from The Guardian newspaper, calling it “The best British novel about the Second World War”, but this isn’t to say that it’s an outright war novel. It’s not even set anywhere near Britain, instead occurring in Shanghai and detailing the Japanese occupation.

The central character, Jim, is a young boy at the outbreak of the war, but spends nearly three years in a POW camp just outside Shanghai, separated from his parents. He learns how to survive and protect his skin, mainly by being ultra-helpful to his fellow prisoners, often to the point of annoyance, even if he doesn’t realise it.

Jim also retreats into his fantasy world, and daydreams of being a pilot in the future. He doesn’t care on whose side, just so long as he can get up in the air and truly be free. His most intense emotional experiences are always connected to the nearby airfield and its gleaming metal wonders.

This novel is highly autobiographical, and it’s amazing to see how knowledgeable Ballard is of his own dizzying interest in just about everything around him. Jim is relentlessly upbeat, even in the face of death and disease at every turn. He is perhaps too trusting, but he’s also brave in his attempts to converse with his prison guards.

Exquisitely written, and with intense detail of every scene, particularly the dead and the dying, this is a simply fantastic book. It truly puts the reader in Jim’s shoes, seeing everything around him destroyed, and his world turned upside down.

It’s this kind of literature, part novel and part history lesson, that makes me realise just how lucky we have it nowadays. I sit here on my sofa, typing on a laptop, with nary a fear in the world, and yet just one or two generations ago people lived through (and died during) terrible atrocities which we can’t even begin to comprehend nowadays.

This type of historical document, especially told through the eyes of a child, is important. It reminds us of how far we’ve come, and how far we’ve still got to go. ( )

This is a theatre of the war you don't often hear about from an equally unexpected perspective: a British kid trapped, alone, in Shanghai during WWII. It's really engrossing, you won't want to put it down. There are some unforgettable characters, made even more interesting when you realize the book is autobiographical. ( )

I often find myself not really reviewing a book but defending it from its detractors. I enjoyed Ballard’s work to the extent that after I read it I ran off to buy another by him.
So when I read some of the reviews about this book, I became defensive.
I do not know to what extent the book is Autobiographical, nor to what extent it was meant to be. Ballard mentions that the novel is based upon what he witnessed as a child during that period, but I think we are supposed to take that statement lightly. The main character never makes a mention of a sister. Some biographical material on Ballard brought up that after the Second World War he returned to England with his sister.
It is a fine point, but one worth mentioning.
Other people seem to think that tale unrealistic. I cannot comment too much – I count myself amongst the lucky who have not spent time in a concentration camp. However if we look at the text we do find a protagonist who from the young age of 10 is constantly thinking about war. In the next part of the book he is 14. War as a presence has been around his life for half of it, and War as a very real thing has been his life for a little less than a third of it, through many of what people would call formulative years.
I can’t be sure, but I feel his actions could be justified. ( )

This book is so real. No bullshit narrative arc where Jim glorifies war and then leaarns the hard way that it's hell; no phantasmagoria of horrors, so when things do get a little hallucinatory, you're just about ready to accept it at face; no trying to impress the reader by making each episode sadder and more awful than the last (it turns out this wasn't the book I remembered from childhood where it was all forcing women to drink water and then jumping on their stomach till it burst, and stepping on babies' heads), because the endless grinding need to stay two steps ahead of the thresher to survive hits us in a less sensationalistic, more uncomfortable way--IS the next war just about to start? Is the security of modern life just a veil, so easily pulled apart forever? Is war not a catastrophe, but the natural state of humanity?

And if that's the case, of course it's a war of all against all, and so Jim's keen evaluative eye and ability to identify with whoever is to his advantage to identify with at the moment is so natural. This book has really interesting things to say (for one) about traditional national stereotypes--Jim's attraction to the hawk-eyed Japanese, cruel and clean among the filth and maggots, and the way it fades before the casual irony and eye to an advantage of the Americans, backed by a billion horsepower in Flying Fortresses (and you are reminded that any national idea would have been as appealing as "America", if it had the circumstances to wax confident and strong in that America had; and I see also that the initial US involvement in Chine came in the 1840s to "protect the Chinese from the British operating in the condition of a monopoly" or similar); his ambivalent relationship with the best survivalist Boy's Own tradition of Britain, represented by Dr. Ransome; and the ultimate fear that the Chinese have it right, and that war of all against all is what's coming, and the cold-eyed and cynical will survive and win.

And, like, I guess this is gauche or whatever to be impressed, but Ballard lived through this. I mean that in both senses: he was there, and he survived. And the book's constant refrain is "Jim knew", and some of the things he knows are most dubious, but he can't afford the luxury of doubt--he needs solid intelligence on which to make life-sustaining decisions. And that bit at the end--it's only a throwaway line, but where Jim looks for his turtle, absurdly, because it is eaten or killed or at the very least miles away--but you're like "a kid needs a turtle. Otherwise all he has to relate to are shity colonist internees (and the colonial whites come out as bad here as they do in, say, The Seed and the Sower) and Japanese fighter pilots." But, oh hell, the fighter pilots are children too, twisted in just the same way. Our grandparents' generation wasn't especially brave for throwing themselves into the meat grinder, which people have been doing since time immemorial; they were brave for coming home and getting together a system that persevered without setting the world on fire (more or less) for 64 years and counting. ( )

I understood that this novel was based around the real life experiences of the author's childhood in Shanghai but although this is a fine and absorbing read I encountered a problem that prevented me from warming to it entirely. I didn't believe it! The boy's reactions to his sudden wrenching away from two loving parents in a highly-priviledged and upper-class gated colonial community into the horror of Japanese invasion just didn't seem likely. He immediately becomes a self-reliant street urchin who suffers no disabilitating mourning for his parents nor his former comforts. He adapts and comforms with a hard-nosed resilience that I find hard to accept he would have possessed. Consequently, I had a slight worry about unreliable narrative syndrome, in a text that flaunted its verisimilitude. ( )