I couldn’t make out Ballard when I first started reading him. The first of his books that I picked up was Kingdom Come which I almost couldn’t finish at some point as it frustrated me endlessly for its vague description of the action that happens, its cold tone and unlikeable characters that I couldn’t care less about. I really started liking Ballard after reading The Drowned World which really blew me away, that I found believable in its grim prediction of the world to come — feverish, swampish, replete with giant mosquitos. All man to himself, like a lot of his other books.
I didn’t know that this world was based on his memories of living as an internee in a Japanese prison camp for Shanghai expats: The fetid atmosphere full of mosquitos, the sun that is too hot, visceral waste. The Drowned World was such a believable world because it came from a personal realm. In fact, I didn’t know Ballard was a young P.O.W. for a long time, and I didn’t connect two and two together. His experience in this camp would shape his person later on his life, his worldview and to a great extent his writing.
Being an Indonesian born decades after the war, the elder generation still speaks of the Japanese occupation with not-so-fond memories, and still remember the obscene of the kempetai, the Japanese gestapo. I have no doubt that Ballard had seen similar brutalities in the camps, and even in the streets of Shanghai, strewn equally with waste and dead bodies. The rivers wash the dead that flowed into it, right to the bays where they will rot. The waters are full of promise of dysentry and endless ghosts, in wrecked boats, the shanty vessels where some of the Shanghainese lived.
Ballard, like Jim in the novel explores the crevices of Shanghai riding on his bicycle. His family is well to do, he cherishes the time he has alone at home (with servants minding their own business), wears a blazer to the Cathedral school close to the Bund. Shanghai was cosmopolitan as it still is, with foreign offices everywhere in the western side, the factories across the rivers in the East, many nationalities live here in the protected international settlement keeping within their own bubble.
That is, until Pearl Harbour. The Japanese coordinated an attack so large that it stretches from Hawaii to Shanghai, and displaced many people. The two Western cruisers in the Bund are quickly captured or decimated, that is the USS Wake and HMS Petrel. There is a scene in the novel where Jim’s father tried to rescue the sailors of these ships in oil infested waters by the mudbank. But this was only a taste of the violence to come.
Jim was separated quickly from his parents, left alone to roam the streets of Shanghai, jumping like a vagabond from one house to another, a beneficiary of the food left by their departed owners. Meeting with a cabin steward who was going to sell him to the Chinese after fattening him up like a calf, but he was too sick and malnourished, like everybody else. Everybody else was a burden to everybody else. Being finally captured, now an occupant of a Shanghainese cinema where foreigners largely go to die. This is even before the epic journey to Longhua and living life in the camp.
Call it a bildungsroman if you will, but if you have subgenre for a war bildungsroman, then nothing else comes close. Jim’s experience, as Ballard’s experience is unique. There is nothing else like having your formative years raised in a Japanese camp. Even though Ballard had his parents with him, Jim was an orphan. But the years in the camp estranged Ballard from his parents, which was partly why he made Jim an orphan. The book benefits for this decision. There is always a sense of danger to Jim, and we automatically root for him even as a “difficult” child, even to the point of supporting the Japanese and wanting to be a Japanese pilot. His sucking up and submissive sort of attitude can seem pathetic, but it is a survival mechanism. At the same time, Jim gets along with people because he cares about them — Dr Ransome, Mrs Phillips, even Basie who only used Jim to his advantage when it suited.
And during this time in the Covid lockdown, I don’t think there has been any other book that I’ve read during this period that is more uplifting, which is ironic because of the grim subject matter. Sure, there are parallels between being locked down in a small apartment and being locked in a Japanese prison camp, but they have it worse. In some ways, it makes me thankful that even being locked down without the privileges of the past that we still have it easy. I don’t have to worry about dying from the cold, or shitting my pants because I’ve got dysentery because there just isn’t any fresh water. There are no rations here, and we still have the privilege to know that food isn’t running out tomorrow. I can get food delivered, instead of waiting two hours for rice with weevils as protein. Who am I to bitch about where I am?
The scary thing about the prison camp, at least for Ballard, is that his family thought they would only be gone for days and instead being interned for two and a half years. There is no end in side for this virus that’s imprisoning us. But I find solace that Jim, and Ballard, eventually adapted and made the best of what they can. The person that emerged out of imprisonment may not be the same person that went inside the first time. I think the cold, cynical tone that is in the voices of Ballard’s characters can be traced back to his experiences in the camp, being a witness to the brutality of the war, and his education turned upside down.
Empire of the Sun is an essential read even if you’re not being interned in prison, lockdown or anywhere. But in any case, we are always prisoners of something. And to read this sort of material has a perverse sense of liberation that maybe, makes you grateful for where you are.
