The first book I read this past week, the week when the world seemed to change, was J.G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun. It was another one of those paperbacks forgotten on my shelves for years, bought somewhere along the road of bookworming life. I fully intended to read it, but unless one hops into a book immediately after purchase, the book has to ferment for a while, until the right circumstances of life obligation, mental weather, and raw will power coalesce to make the endeavor appear attractive again. And for some reason, this week was the week for Empire of the Sun.

The novel is a fictionalized version of Ballard’s own experience as a child during WWII, his idyllic life in the international settlement of Shanghai disrupted by the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor and the settlement’s subsequent invasion by the Japanese army. After spending a couple of months scavenging through the wreckage of Shanghai, separated from his parents, Jim, the protagonist and stand-in for Ballard, is apprehended and sent to live in the Lunghua Civilian Assembly Center, where he stayed for the next three years until the war’s end. 

The book, soaked in death and deprivation and the rapid dissolution of civilization, is paradoxically a delight. Despite everything he has lost, Jim is rarely sad, rarely anxious. He is constantly resourceful and wily in his relationships with the grownups around the camp but also genuinely compassionate. He is somehow both entirely ruthless in his quest for another sweet potato and genuinely altruistic toward others. Perhaps the most morally interesting aspect of his character is how he admires the Japanese airmen, hoping to be one of them someday, and how by the end of the war he has become rather good at existing within it. He is entirely apprehensive about the end of the war because he has come to enjoy it. This echoes one of the central lessons of Tim O’Brien’s short story collection The Things They Carried, which is that war is horrible and yet also the most exciting experience possible, so that regular civilization afterward is a nourishing boredom. Perhaps it’s because of this competitive excitement that all war literature (and especially all war film) ends up being pro-war, no matter how noble its original intentions. Anything that dramatizes war helplessly glamorizes it at the same time. In this way someone like John Updike is one of the strongest anti-war writers because of his lifelong refusal to narrate it. He refuses to grant it his attention. 

I began reading the novel thinking it was a barely fictionalized version of Ballard’s own experience as a boy, a belief that grew shakier with each subsequent paragraph. After some Googling, I learned that the novel really is much more fictionalized. Though Ballard spent time in the camp at Lunghua, he never lost his parents. This is not a small revision. It’s Jim’s orphaned status (he is reunited with his parents at the end) that is the real inciting and exciting premise of the novel. All good children’s stories begin by eliminating the parents. It’s the doorway that leads to true adventure. 

This much wider fictionalized margin results in a more interesting book. It’s a novel that feels life-like. That is, it contains the almost random tugs and diversions of real life. It doesn’t communicate its architecture or themes overtly. It’s much more rangy than the movie version. Naturally, one might say, since most movie versions are much more structurally clearer than their novel source material. But still, for a novel it feels looser, almost journal like. There are even parts that are plainly dull, where the sense of adventure fades, where the plot, such as it is, circles back on itself. The reunion with his parents, his one goal throughout the novel, one which seems more and more unlikely, is oddly anticlimactic; they don’t appear on stage to do anything at the end. The plot satisfaction that their return might deliver is obscured by Jim commanding his old chauffeur, now re-employed, to drive him out to Lunghua one last time. The most convenient narrative tying up of loose ends is Jim’s quick reunion with Dr. Ransome. Ransome had been his chief mentor in the camp, in competition with Basie, the amoral and interestingly effeminate trickster figure who first takes Jim under his powdered wing near the funeral docks of Nantao. Their quick reunion, as Jim returns to the camp after wandering around the outskirts of Shanghai prior to the full arrival of American troops, is the most conspicuously convenient portion of the narrative. But even this is not given the full strings treatment. Paradoxically, where the plot would seem to yearn for Spielbergian rushes of music, Ballard draws back, skates on, moves to more interesting territory. It’s a strikingly unsentimental novel. 

Yes, yes, yes, but why now? Why this week, a week in which I have been unable to concentrate on anything more fully formed than the latest disaster headlines and the accumulating vapor of my own anxiety? Why read this novel now and read it with a sustained attention I’m rarely able to summon for anything else? 

Do I think our current situation and the outbreak of WWII in the Pacific are comparable? No, I don’t. And I think that’s in part why the novel was so alluring. It’s an escapism into the pure Known. All of the disaster that Jim witnesses and experiences is so visible, so easily comprehensible. Hunger, the loss of one’s parents, the constant threat of death by hostile forces — all terrible, but here, in this book, it makes sense. Whereas current American life does not make sense. We are living through an absence of sense, of concrete detail, of a stable narrative or narrator. We are in the land of as if. We are in a gap space of waiting to see what might happen, or at least at what scale events might happen, how bad it might get. And that unknown void is filled by the imagination (or, at least, by my imagination), and the result is horrifying. Each morning I awake and experience an ever shortening splinter of time where I am unaware of our new unreality. And then I remember. And then in the time it takes me to rouse myself and do some proactive domestic chore, I imagine all the horrible events that might happen: who might go to the hospital, who might die, how long this island-like life might last, what epoch-like economic tumult might transpire, what unvisited tributaries of calamity exist downstream. The mind is a terrible weapon. Anxiety is a kind of auto-immune disorder of the imagination. The ability to envision what might happen is mercilessly accelerated, so that one is paralyzed by all the proliferating mental possibilities. In fact, so much of my life doesn’t happen, because I am terrified of what might happen. I spend my days swinging between feeling utterly ridiculous and utterly terrified. In between I wash my hands.