These strange dislocations appealed to Jim. He spends much of the book wandering the outskirts of Shanghai, a witness to endless destruction as the armed forces of China, Japan, America, and Great Britain converge.
Jim is about ten years old when war disrupts his family’s comfortable life in Shanghai, causing him to become separated from his parents. For the most part this novel is an eyewitness account of events I observed during the Japanese occupation of Shanghai and within the camp at Lunghua. (Civilian Assembly Centre), where I was interned from 1942 to 1945. Ballard writes in his Foreword:Įmpire of the Sun describes my experiences in Shanghai, China, during the Second World War, and in Lunghua C.A.C. Sebald continuously hovering between his lines. I wasn’t too far into this cruel novel of World War II intern camps and, almost incidentally, the birth of atomic warfare, before I found myself reading intertextually, as it were, reading Ballard with the ghost of W.G. Empire of the Sun is a stunning and altogether very curious piece of writing. Ballard’s 1984 autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun until now, but I finally read it recently.
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