Empire of the Sun (Paperback)

by J. G. Ballard (Author) "WARS CAME EARLY to Shanghai, overtaking each other like the tides that raced up the Yangtze and returned to this gaudy city all the coffins..." (more)
Key Phrases: Amherst Avenue, Private Kimura, Lunghua Airfield (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review
"An outstanding novel...a classic adventure story."

-- The New York Times

"A profound and moving work of the imagination."

-- Los Angeles Times Book Review

"An incredible literary achievement....Brilliant."

-- Anthony Burgess

Product Description

The classic, award-winning novel, made famous by Steven Spielberg's film, tells of a young boy's struggle to survive World War II in China.

Jim is separated from his parents in a world at war. To survive, he must find a strength greater than all the events that surround him.

Shanghai, 1941 -- a city aflame from the fateful torch of Pearl Harbor. In streets full of chaos and corpses, a young British boy searches in vain for his parents. Imprisoned in a Japanese concentration camp, he is witness to the fierce white flash of Nagasaki, as the bomb bellows the end of the war...and the dawn of a blighted world.

Ballard's enduring novel of war and deprivation, internment camps and death marches, and starvation and survival is an honest coming-of-age tale set in a world thrown utterly out of joint.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster (March 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743265238
• ISBN-13: 978-0743265232
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #46,324 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Humanity, stripped to its core, May 23, 2007

By	Charles E. Stevens - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

My first introduction to this story was, like many others, through Steven Spielberg's adaptation. For me, the hauntingly beautiful "Suo Gan" that serves as that movie's de facto theme song perfectly captures the fragile yet enduring beauty of humanity that Spielberg so successfully captures in his movie version. The movie abounds with poignant moments of hope, warmth, and exhilaration amongst the great struggles that befall Jim and his band of acquaintances. I enjoyed the movie, and Jim's story and haunting memory of Suo Gan made a lasting impression.

Years later, I encountered the original story--J.G. Ballard's novel that served as Spielberg's inspiration. Just as the newsreels and magazines that tell of the war fascinate Jim in the book because they describe a war so different than the one he knows, so does Spielberg's movie tell a different tale from Ballard's book. The events are by and large the same, but the tone of the story, the horrors experienced by Jim, and the lessons and impressions instilled by the novel are on a different order of magnitude from the movie. I enjoyed the movie on its own merits, but I imagine the order in which you encounter them colors your impression--for people like me who saw the movie first, it was easy to appreciate the movie, and then be blown away by the power of the book. For those who read the book first, I would imagine the movie would be a disappointing, sanitized version of the original work.

The novel overpowers the reader from start to finish by Ballard's stark account of Jim's survival against all odds, in conditions stacked heavily against him. Death, betrayal, illness, and hunger surround Jim and yet somehow he always managed to survive because he never despairs, never gives up, always keeps his wits about him, and as he himself explains, because he "takes nothing for granted." The world of WWII Shanghai strips humanity to its bare, naked, ugly core. Growing up in this environment, Jim becomes a remarkably complex character in spite of (or perhaps because of) his young age. Jim is intelligent, naive, loyal, callous, hopeful, curious, delusional, and yet oddly lucid--all at the same time. The image of flight is strong throughout the story, as a form of escape, and in some ways the only vestige of childhood granted to this boy as he goes through a life full of cruel ironies--first, the inability despite repeated attempts to surrender to an enemy that he needs infinitely more than they need him; then, the odd realization that this "enemy" is his greatest protector and in many instances, friend; finally, that even with the war over he is in greater danger and further from his parents than ever. War, peace, friend, foe, cause, effect, even the distinction between life and death ... these cease to have meaning for Jim. Finally, Jim is saved in an almost deus ex machina fashion by the heroic Dr. Ransome, a man whose selfless actions mildly amuse and baffle Jim, who cannot quite understand this brand of humanity which is quite different from the one he learned through his own experiences. Ransome's life is one that takes certain things for granted. Jim has not been afforded this luxury.

Jim's reunion with his parents is another, critical difference between the movie and the book. The "happily-ever after" ending in the movie is filled with hope and relief. Jim and his parents don't recognize each other at first. Then they do. This symbolizes that the war is finally over for Jim, now he can go back to a normal life. The End. In the book, however, the ending is much more nuanced. Despite returning "home" to Shanghai, Jim's home will forever be Lunghua in the novel version. Normalcy will never be a suburban life in England, for Jim it is wartime Shanghai. The odds of Jim being able to live what most of us would call a "normal life" are practically zero ... after all, he has just experienced a lifetime of events more "real" and vivid than "normal life" could ever be; the war never ends for Jim. Seeing the far-from-normal life Ballard himself has lead, and the fiction he has written, one realizes that even though "Jim" and "J.G. Ballard" may not be the same person (one crucial difference--Ballard is never separated from his parents), Ballard is still the adult that Jim would have grown up to be. It is this honest and uncompromising portrayal of Jim as a true tragic hero that separates the book from the movie, and makes this book one of the truly great accounts of surviving a brutal war that knows and shows no mercy.

32 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Survival amidst death, April 24, 2006

By	Recogitare - See all my reviews

A most incredible book... It holds the reader glued to every page, not unlike the grip of death which encased Shangai after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December of 1941.

The story, based on J.G. Ballard's actual experiences, is about a young British teenager who lives with his parents in Shangai at the eve of Pearl Harbor and is then interned by the Japanese from 1942-1945 in the Lunghua prison camp near Shanghai. It is truly mesmerizing, in the negative sense unfortunately, because of the countless moments of inherent evil that arose as a result of war. The places-airfield runways made of bones of dead Chinese, a make-shift cemetery full of corpses with extremities sticking out, canals full of dead bodies, floating flower coffins with Chinese babies-the people-an opportunistic American soldier who profits from death, Japanese soldiers bent on brutality, an American doctor who does everything to save the sick and dying, the indifference of a British woman to a sick boy-and events-the killing of a Chinese coolie, the never-ending deaths of sick prisoners, the death march to Nantao-exemplify that evil and are described with such incredible detail and clarity as to be almost permanently engraved in the mind of the reader.

Through all the death and destruction, of which almost every chapter of the book is filled with, lives a young British teenager (the author himself, but written in 3rd person) who has an incredible will to survive. The question of his morality is ever-present if we judge his thoughts and actions solely; yet in the face of starvation and omnipresent death, his story is one of a smart young boy who is trying his best to survive. When viewed under those circumstances and compared to the actions of others in the book, his story can be perceived in a more positive yet still overwhelmingly sad light. Indeed, it is the author's reconstruction of his thoughts in particular that divulge the horror of the events he experienced. One of the most memorable concerns the death march to Nantao:

"Dr. Ransome had recruited a human chain from the men sitting on the embankment below the trucks, and they passed pails of water up to the patients.

Jim shook his head, puzzled by all this effort. Obviously they were being taken up-country so that the Japanese could kill them without being seen by the American pilots. Jim listened to the Shell man's wife crying in the yellow grass. The sunlight charged the air above the canal, an intense aura of hunger that stung his retinas and remind him of the halo formed by the exploding Mustang. The burning body of the American pilot had quickened the dead land. It would be for the best if they all died; it would bring their lives to an end that had been implicit ever since the Idzumo had sunk the Petrel and the British hand surrendered at Singapore without a fight.

Perhaps they were already dead. Jim lay back and tried to count the motes of light. This simple truth was known to every Chinese from birth. Once the British internees had accepted it, they would no longer fear their journey to the killing ground...."

Steven Spielberg's adaptation of the book in the 1986 movie of the same name is insufficient at best. While the cinematography and acting are good, the crux of the story-the cruelty and horrors of post-Pearl Harbor Shangai-is conveniently glossed over. It's as if Spielberg decided to change the script from an "R" to a "G". The problem is that the latter version of the movie no longer resembles the former and effectively does injustice to the thousands of people (and millions more not included in the scope of the book)-including the author himself-who suffered and/or died in Lunghua prison and Shangai from 1942-1945 at the hands of the Japanese.

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Coming of Age, July 7, 2005

By	Mr. Lu. (Denver) - See all my reviews

I first became acquainted with this story thru the marvelous Steven Spielberg movie. I thought it was such a powerful story that I bought the book the day after I saw the movie.

The story is an account of the author experiences after war breaks while he is in Shanghai. Separated from his parents and sent to a concentration camp Jim has to learn to survive on his own by creating alliances with other prisoners.

This is a coming of age story that will stay with you for a long time. Highly recommended.