Empire of the Sun (41 page)

Fifty feet below them, the Chinese watched without comment as the arcs of urine formed a foaming stream that ran down to the street. When it reached the pavement the Chinese stepped back, their faces expressionless. Jim glanced at the people around him, the clerks and coolies and peasant women, well aware of what they were thinking. One day China would punish the rest of the world, and take a frightening revenge.

The army projectionists had rewound their film, and an air battle started again over the heads of the crowds. As the sailors were carried away in a convoy of rickshaws, Jim walked back to the
Arrawa.
His parents were resting in the passenger saloon on the upper deck, and Jim wanted to spend a last evening with his father before he and his mother sailed for England the next day.

He stepped on to the gangway, conscious that he was probably leaving Shanghai for the last time, setting out for a small, strange country on the other side of the world which he had never visited, but which was nominally ‘home’. Yet only part of his mind would leave Shanghai. The rest would remain there forever, returning on the tide like the coffins launched from the funeral piers at Nantao.

Below the bows of the
Arrawa
a child’s coffin moved on to the night stream. Its paper flowers were shaken loose by the wash of a landing-craft carrying sailors from the American cruiser. The flowers formed a wavering garland around the coffin as it began its long journey to the estuary of the Yangtze, only to be swept back by the incoming tide among the quays and mud-flats, driven once again to the shores of this terrible city.

P.S.

Ideas, interviews & features…

About the author

An Investigative Spirit

Travis Elborough talks to J.G. Ballard

IN SEVERAL OF
your novels you have used a small community, the residents of a luxury housing development or a high-rise block for example, as a microcosm with which to explore the fragility of civil society. Do you think that your preoccupation with social regression, de-evolution even, stems from your childhood experiences in the internment camp when you saw, first hand, how easily the veneer of civilization could slip away?

Yes, I think it does; although anyone who has experienced a war first hand knows that it completely overturns every conventional idea of what makes up day-to-day reality. You never feel quite the same again. It’s like walking away from a plane crash; the world changes for you forever. The experience of spending nearly three years in a camp, especially as an early teenage boy, taking a keen interest in the behaviour of adults around him, including his own parents, and seeing them stripped of all the garments of authority that protect adults generally in their dealings with children, to see them stripped of any kind of defence, often losing heart a bit, being humiliated and frightened – and we all felt the war was going to go on forever and heaven knows what might happen in the final stages – all of that was a remarkable education. It was unique, and it gave me a tremendous insight into what makes up human behaviour.

You’ve written that the landscape of even your first novel,
The Drowned World,
a futuristic portrait of a flooded twenty-first-century London, was clearly informed by your memories of Shanghai. I wondered if you could say a little about how, after having possibly explored it obliquely in your works of science fiction, you came to write so directly about your childhood experiences in
Empire of the Sun
?

‘Anyone who has experienced a war first hand knows that it completely overturns every conventional idea of what makes up day-to-day reality. It’s like walking away from a plane crash.’

I had always planned to write about my experiences of the Second World War, Shanghai under the Japanese and the camp. I knew that it was such an important event, and not just for me. But when I came to England in 1946 I had to face the huge problem of adjusting to life here. England in those days was a very, very strange place. There was an elaborate class system that I’d never come across in Shanghai. England…it was a terribly shabby place, you know, locked into the past and absolutely exhausted by the war. It was only on a technicality that we could be said to have won the war; in many ways we’d lost it. Financially we were desperate. I had to cope with all this. By 1949 the Communists had taken over China and I knew I would never go back. So there seemed no point in keeping those memories alive, I felt I had to come to terms with life in England. This is, after all, where I was educated. I got married and began my career as a writer.

England interested me. It seemed to be a sort of disaster area. It was a subject and a disaster in its own right. I was interested in change, which I could see was coming in a big way, everything from supermarkets to jet travel, television and the consumer society. I remember thinking, my God, these things will bring change to England and reveal the strange psychology of these tormented people.

So I began writing science fiction, although most readers of science fiction did not consider me to be a science fiction writer. They saw me as an interloper, a sort of virus that had got into the cell of science fiction, entered its nucleus and destroyed it. But all this while I could see bits of my China past floating up and I knew I was going to write it up at some point.

You have to remember that an enormous period of time had elapsed between the publication of
Empire of the Sun
in 1984 and my time in the camp, some forty-odd years. And I think partly this was because I had children of my own. I didn’t want to expose them to the kind of experiences that I had had. Once my children had grown up, I thought, well, if I don’t write this book now I am going to forget it. So in about 1982 or something, I thought, now is the time. Of course the act of writing it brought back a huge flood of memories. I don’t want to over glamorize my wartime experience. It was pretty awful. My parents had much harsher memories of it than I did. Teenage children, especially if they are with their parents or other adults, tend to be unaware of the dangers they are in. They get by on very little food, they live for the excitement of the camp, and to some extent I’d suppressed all that.

One of the most significant differences between
Empire of the Sun
and your own life is that in the novel Jim is separated from his parents, while you were interned with your family. Your relationship with your parents appears to have been difficult; you’ve written that there was ‘an estrangement between my parents and myself that lasted all my life’. By making Jim parentless, were you in fictional form perhaps giving expression to that estrangement?

‘An enormous period of time had elapsed between the publication of
Empire of the Sun
in 1984 and my time in the camp, some forty-odd years. And I think partly this was because I had children of my own. I didn’t want to expose them to the kind of experiences that I had had.’

Yes, exactly. I don’t want to make too much of it. Although I spent nearly three years in the camp in one small room with my parents, and my much younger sister, I was very much a free agent. They were only too glad when I left the room and went out into the camp, on my various errands and adventures, doing this and that, trying to wangle a copy of
Popular Mechanics
or
Reader’s Digest
from the American merchant seaman I attached myself to. You see, parents had no authority over their children in the camp. They didn’t have any levers. Being strictly matter of fact, my parents couldn’t feed me, they couldn’t clothe me and they couldn’t keep me warm. They had very little control over me. Family life is a collection of pressures, compromises, promises and treats, affections and displays of love, and I think my parents were too tired most of the time to be all that interested in me. I think that led to the estrangement; though the estrangement wasn’t on the emotional level, it was on a sort of administrative level.

When I came to write
Empire of the Sun,
I thought I would have to follow my own life and have the parents in the camp too. But it didn’t really give the right impression. People would think that if the parents were in the camp as well, then they would be able to protect Jim and that he wouldn’t be in any danger. And that they’d never be in any danger from the Japanese, or that he would never be in any danger from himself, or from his own growing imagination. I felt that this just wasn’t true and so I decided to make him a sort of war orphan.

Can I ask you what you made of Steven Spielberg’s film of
Empire of the Sun
?

I liked the film. I think it is a very impressive piece of work. I see it once every couple of years. It was made, oh, getting on for twenty years ago now, in 1987, and it seems to have got richer and more interesting as the years pass. I see it not as the film of my book but as a film in its own right. Seeing a novel that you’ve written filmed is always an enormously peculiar experience because you are conscious of a thousand and one discrepancies. You can’t help thinking: ‘It wasn’t like that in my book.’ There’s no reason why it should be exactly alike, after all, but it was a very impressive film.

In
The Kindness of Women
you continued Jim’s story. Do you have any plans for any further autobiographical works?

No. I think those two books take care of my life. Who knows, one day I might write an autobiography, but I don’t think so.

You studied medicine and have stated that you believe that the contemporary novelist should be like a scientist. Do you ever regret not qualifying as a doctor?

I was very interested in medicine. The experience of dissecting cadavers for two years was a very important one for me, for all sorts of reasons. I do think that novelists should be like scientists, dissecting the cadaver…I would like to have become a doctor, but the urge to write was too great. I knew from friends of mine who were a year or two ahead of me that once you actually joined a London hospital or became a junior doctor the pressures of work were too great. I’d never have any time to write, and the urge to write was just too strong.

‘One of the things I took from my wartime experiences was that reality was a stage set…Nothing is as secure as we like to think it is.’

Do you think there is a moral purpose to your fiction?

I am not sure about that. I see myself more as a kind of investigator, a scout who is sent on ahead to see if the water is drinkable or not.

As a scout or investigator you’ve been uncannily prescient, famously predicting Reagan’s presidency in
The Atrocity Exhibition,
and I noticed that one commentator made reference to
The Drowned World
in the aftermath of the New Orleans disaster. Have you ever worried that you might be
too
prescient?

An investigator and a sort of early warning system, let’s put it like that. I suppose one of the things I took from my wartime experiences was that reality was a stage set. The reality that you took for granted – the comfortable day-to-day life, school, the home where one lives, the familiar street and all the rest of it, the trips to the swimming pool and the cinema – was just a stage set. They could be dismantled overnight, which they literally were when the Japanese occupied Shanghai and turned our lives upside down. I think that experience left me with a very sceptical eye, which I’ve turned onto something even as settled as English suburbia where I now live. Nothing is as secure as we like to think it is. One doesn’t just have to think of Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans – this applies to everything. A large part of my fiction tries to analyse what is going on around us, and whether we are much different people from the civilized human beings we imagine ourselves to be. I think it’s true of all my fiction. I think that investigative spirit forms all my novels really.

LIFE at a Glance

BORN

Shanghai, China, 1930

EDUCATED

Cathedral School, Shanghai

The Leys School, Cambridge

King’s College, Cambridge

FAMILY

Married Helen Mathews, 1956. One son, two daughters

LIVES

Shepperton, Middlesex

A Writing Life

When do you write?

Morning and early afternoon.

Where do you write?

In my sitting room.

Why do you write?

The great mystery.

Pen or computer?

Pen, then type myself.

Silence or music?

Silence.

How do you start a book?

I usually write a detailed synopsis.

And finish?

With a large full stop.

Do you have any writing rituals or superstitions?

No.

TOP TEN BOOKS

Moby-Dick

Herman Melville

The Loved One

Evelyn Waugh

The Big Sleep

Raymond Chandler

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Lewis Carroll

The Trial

Franz Kafka

The Tempest

William Shakespeare