A Ballardian Tour of Wartime Shanghai
I’m a big fan of J.G. Ballard’s atmospheric and unsettling novels. His first book The Drowned World, describes a London transformed into tropical swampland – in later works like Crash and Kingdom Come, the transformation is more subtle, featuring quiet British surburbs that seethe with hidden violence.
It’s always tempting to pin a writer’s themes on their own personal histories – but critics have long assumed that Ballard’s curious themes would have found their beginning in his childhood in occupied Shanghai, and subsequent internment in the Lunghua Concentration Camp.
[audio:MiraclesofLife.mp3]
In his autobiography, Miracles of Life, Ballard speaks plainly about the experiences only fictionally described in Empire of the Sun. In this short extract from the book, read by Tim Piggot-Smith, Ballard describes the immediate aftermath of the Chinese defeat in 1937 – while bodies rot in the city’s verges, the international community continues its daily round of parties and daytrips. And in a scene recognisable to anyone familiar with his autobiographical novel, the young J.G. discovers an old, battered fighter plane…
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