donn@utah-gr.UUCP (Donn Seeley) (12/03/84)
A lot of sf readers profess not to enjoy the work of J G Ballard. His stories are often cold and pessimistic, built around metaphors instead of plot or character development; his anti-heroes behave irrationally at best; his universes are usually brutal and indifferent to human struggles. I sometimes think these things, and it's true that I haven't bought very much that Ballard has done recently, but I find that many images from Ballard stories stick with me and that upon rereading they seem to mean different things. Novels like THE CRYSTAL WORLD, THE DROUGHT, stories like 'The Terminal Beach', 'Chronopolis', 'The Voices of Time' or (my favorite) 'Build-up', have dream-like settings which appeal strongly to me when I'm in the right mood. Why is Ballard's fictional space so strange? It's not because he indulges in fashionable technophobia and world-weariness; in Charles Platt's interview with Ballard in DREAM MAKERS we hear: 'I'm completely out of sympathy with the whole antitechnology movement... [A]ll these doom-sayers and echo-watchers -- their prescriptions for disaster always strike me as simply wrong, factually, and also appallingly defeatist, expressing some sort of latent sense of failure. I feel very OPTIMISTIC about science and technology. And yet almost my entire fiction has been an illustration of the opposite. I show all these entropic universes with everything running down. I think it has a lot to do with my childhood in Shanghai during the war.' EMPIRE OF THE SUN (Simon and Schuster, 1984; 279 pp.) is a novel which deals with Ballard's wartime experiences in excruciating detail. It is unlike anything of Ballard's that I have ever read before; in fact it (deceptively) reads like a straightforward mainstream novel, but it really is an exhaustive catalog of all the images and characters which Ballard has used in his work. The drained swimming pools, the wrecks of aircraft, the inhuman protagonists, the Kafkaesque agents of authority: they're all here, and it's exceedingly disturbing that they can't be dismissed as figments of nightmares as they sometimes can in Ballard's stories. They are all real, terrifyingly real, all evidences of a basic disturbance in the universe which has caused the rind of culture and civilization that we take for granted to be peeled away. Young Jim is eleven years old in December, 1941, when the novel opens; he lives a comfortable existence as the son of a well-to-do English mill owner in Shanghai. Across the Yangtze the Japanese gather for their final assault, but life among the expatriates proceeds as usual. On the morning of December 8 (December 7 across the date line in Hawaii), the ships in the Shanghai roads are bombed by the Japanese, and in the ensuing panic Jim is separated from his parents. He manages to find his way back to his house in the British quarter, but his parents never return... Jim's world begins to bend, then crack under the weight of events; his childish outlook is never shaken, however, and it adapts in a remarkable way to account for a life of eating weevils for protein, volunteering for kitchen duty in order to steal sweet potatoes, watching Chinese beaten to death for sport by guards, stripping bodies of salable possessions. In short he becomes a classic Ballard character: someone whose soul has died but whose body lives on. This is not a novel for people who maintain that war brings out heroism in the common man. In EMPIRE, war is simply an efficient way of converting common men and women into bloated, fly-spotted corpses. EMPIRE OF THE SUN is not a book for the squeamish, but it is an effective book: it achieves its narrative purpose, it shocks you from your complacent existence, showing you just how little experience you may have of the way the world operates outside your comfortable pocket in it. It is not technically a science fiction novel, but its world is as alien to ours as any distant planet, and it is an encyclopedia of images from Ballard's sf. Despite my lingering revulsion, I'm glad I bought the book. Donn Seeley University of Utah CS Dept donn@utah-cs.arpa 40 46' 6"N 111 50' 34"W (801) 581-5668 decvax!utah-cs!donn