1001 Group Read--Dec, 2011: Empire of the Sun

This is the thread for the December group read. I am trying to finish the book I'm on now Mansfield Park before I jump in on this one.

Ordered my copy and now I'm just waiting on it.

My copy arrived. Will be starting it tomorrow

I requested it from the library. I am sorry that I always finish so late with these group reads.

Billiejean, don't be sorry. That means that you give the books a lot of thought before you write your opinion. We love having you in the group.

I'm about to leave for Amsterdam, taking this with me as airplane reading. At first I found the writing kind of disturbingly stark since I am concurrently reading McEwan's lushly-written "Saturday." But now I am seeing that if you have incredible things to tell, you don't need all the fancy writing. Actually McEwan's book bothers me a lot for that very reason: much ado about nothing. But "Empire of the Sun" is an amazing story, disorienting from the very beginning, a completely different perspective on the same war our last book was about. Lots to think about there, actually -- about the value of a single life and how differently writers/cultures/outsiders register it.

Anna, have a safe trip and a merry Christmas. You have put forward some interesting insights there.

Oh, I'm still reading Empire of the Sun here in Amsterdam. It's an amazing book. The way he can recover a child's perspective on these astonishing events, accepting them as just the things life puts in his way. I'm very struck by young Jim's attitude toward the Chinese among whom he lives, as if they are a completely different species whom he respects (though not as much as the Japanese) but whose very reasons for living and dying are quite puzzling. His entire world, both before the war and during it, is so immensely bizarre and violent, yet is treated by him as ordinary existence.

I wonder how all these parents, bringing their children up in this environment, actually expected them to function once they were sent "home" to England for school. Even without the war, Jim is pretty much living on another planet from a child in England. Or not? I wonder what others think of his "normal" life, and how it prepares him for what follows.

Just finished Empire of the Sun. I'd seen the movie several years ago and remember loving it, but for some reason I'd never picked up the book before. I loved it--especially Jim's mixed feelings towards the Japanese and American soldiers and the juxtaposition between his maturity (how he handles camp life) and naivety (his views of the world as a whole).

I found it quite hard to get into, I've been reading for several days, and have mostly found myself after a while staring out the window, or making another cup of tea, or doing the washing up, instead of reading it. So I was barely 50 pages in by Sunday afternoon, having started it on a Thursday.

I think I've finally got the hang of it now - it was the lack of emotion in all the horrible things that were happening that made it hard for me to get into a reading rhythm. (And a lot of lack of knowledge over this bit of history wasn't helping.)

#8> I described it as "irresponsible parenting" to Don the other night, and I'm sticking with that. :)

I mean, who takes a smallish child to see a battlefield complete with corpses and dead horses? In what world is that considered a fun outing??

I'm wondering how much is autobiographical as well, and how much a childhood like this explains his fiction. (I've previously read Crash and didn't find much to like/enjoy/appreciate in it. Horrid book.)

Finished the book the other day, I enjoyed it. Only thing that I found questionable was that the war ended and he was reunited with his mother so quickly. It was like the author was to the end of writing it and then remembered he was so to reunited them and wrote a few extra pages.

I finished the book a few days ago and like wookiebender I found it hard to get into so had to take it in small doses. The lack of emotion is hard to comprehend next to all of the horrifying images described by a small boy so I found it disorientating - but I guess that was the point?

I loved the perspective on a child's ability to adapt and accept the world they live in - no matter how violent. This was brilliant at portraying a childs view on horrific times without adult judgement or analysis.

I have read a couple of JG Ballard books before and I always find them hard going but immensley satisfying when I have finished and can start to reflect back - this one was no different and I ended up thouroughly loving this book.

Just finished the book. I put a long comment on my own thread but have a few thoughts for here too.

In comparing this book to Patterns of Childhood and also to Schindler's Ark, and even to Doctor Zhivago -- all 1001 Books about the second world war that I've read recently, I thought about what made this book, and this war, really different. At first I thought that I was just missing the adult "voice" that gave meaning to the events, even as it showed how senseless they were.

But now I think that, especially between Schindler and this book, we are looking at two different forms of war. In Germany, the Nazis waged war against the humanity of an entire race, the Jews; and in doing so, they gutted their own humanity as well. You get this both from Schindler and Patterns. But in Ballard's China, there is no humanity at all, none, not for anybody. Nobody cares about others, or thinks about them. THe dehumanization is already there before the war, in the way the English and CHinese think about one another. It's not propagandistic and active like in Germany; it's a strange, eerie chasm of race and privilege. But in the prison camps, even the English don't actually care about one another. The most they can say is, "Buck up, remember that you're British" and never "I care about you." Out in the wilds of the Shanghai/Suzhou wastelands in the last days of the war, nobody cares at all about anybody else. Jim's act of staying beside Mr. Maxted as he dies, and the soldier who gives Jim the mango, are the ONLY acts of humanity that occur, and they are incredibly small amidst all the ruthlessness.

Somewhere near the end Jim remembers Dr. Ransome saying that the most dangerous people are those who expect nothing. This has been a war, an entire mixing of civilizations, that has left everybody expecting nothing. Jim thinks that 500 million Chinese expect nothing and must be taught to expect everything. It's a quite amazing thing, in a sense, that this has in fact happened.

My own daughter was born and spent the first six years of her life right there, near SuZhou, where Jim's parents are held in a prison camp. When I was there to adopt her, I went to the Museum of the Rape of Nanjing in Nanjing. It was a moving experience that makes even more sense to me now. But I also see how history has been written to make much more "sense," to separate the good guys from the bad guys along very clear lines. When Jim reads Time and Life, he thinks how odd the war in Europe is because everybody knows which side they are on, so different from his own experience of war. In that sense his war is more like Doctor Zhivago's, a chaos of civil and international conflict where civilians can only guess who might hurt or protect them at any given moment, where loyalties and beliefs gradually disappear. But in Doctor Zhivago, humanity remains; in Empire of the Sun, it's as absent as belief.

Finished. Can't say I particularly enjoyed it, but I got more out of it than I did out of Crash. (Have I mentioned recently I found that a very unpleasant/difficult book? :)

Fascinating story, filled in some gaps in my knowledge of history, I think it was worth the struggle it was at times.

ETA: I think I need to think/say more on his reunion with his parents, who have become even more distant and unable to share their experiences with him. That was a pretty shattering moment for me.

And that they all just fell back into sitting around pools (with unmowed grass) and almost went back to everything as it was before was just... bizarre.

I finally finished the book, and I thought it was pretty amazing to see everything from the perspective of a child. From the beginning where he thought the war was started by his hazy memory of semaphore to the end where he kept thinking that WW3 had already started, I thought that his perspective on things was fresh and different. Anne Frank had this perspective, but she seemed more mature to me. I could not believe that he still cared about Mrs. Vincent when she would not help him when he was sick. What mother would not help a sick child? Although the finding of the parents was not explained satisfactorily, I was happy to see them reunited. There was just too much unhappiness throughout the book.

This was a great choice for a group read.