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    Empire of the Sun
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    Empire of the Sun
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    Empire of the Sun
    Audiobook (abridged)2 hours

    Empire of the Sun

    Written by J. G. Ballard

    Narrated by Samuel West

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    The heartrending story of British boy Jim’s four year ordeal in a Japanese prison camp during the second world war. Filmed by Steven Spielberg.
    Now available for the first time on CD.

    Based on J. G. Ballard’s own childhood, this is the extraordinary account of a boy’s life in Japanese-occupied wartime Shanghai – a mesmerising, hypnotically compelling novel of war, of starvation and survival, of internment camps and death marches. It blends searing honesty with an almost hallucinatory vision of a world thrown utterly out of joint.

    Rooted as it is in the author’s own disturbing experience of war in our time, it is one of a handful of novels by which the twentieth century will be not only remembered but judged.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins Publishers
    Release dateFeb 4, 2008
    ISBN9780007273348
    Author

    J. G. Ballard

    J.G. Ballard (1930–2009) was the author of numerous books, including Concrete Island, The Kindness of Women, and Crash. He is revered as one of the most important writers of fiction to address the consequences of twentieth-century technology. 

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    Reviews for Empire of the Sun

    4/5

    52 ratings35 reviews

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    • 4/5
      "Empire of the Sun," is a semi-autobiographical novel of when J.G. Ballard was at the Lunghua Interment Camp as a boy during WWII.The story opens when the protagonist, Jim, age eleven, is with his parents at an early Christmas event, just prior to Pearl Harbor.Chinese refugees and beggars are everywhere and people become immune to their plight. As Jim's family goes to the Christmas event, their driver goes over the foot of an old beggar outside their compound. The driver doesn't stop and no one says anything.I thought this was an interesting comparison to the Bible story of the good Samaritan stopping by the road to help someone in distress. Here they were going to a Christmas party but didn't feel much of the charity of Christ.That night the Japanese attack an American and British military vessel in the harbor and war begins for Shanghai.Jim sees the war through his own eyes. He's very analytical and nonjudgmental. He's separated from his parents and spends the next few months living at his parents and their friends vacant homes, until the food is used up.Later he surrenders to the Japanese and spends most of the war at the Lunghua Interment Camp.He sees the empire of the sun when the bomb explodes at Nagasaki.As the war is coming to an end, the prisoners are moved from their camp to another at an old Olympic stadium. They are forced marched to this location and many die.I enjoyed Jim's descriptions of life, the author's slow pace in telling the story as if this is what the life was like.
    • 5/5
      An autobiographical account of Ballard's childhood years spent during the Japanese occupation in Shanghai during World War II, Empire of the Sun is an effective and evocative tale of survival. The setting and the historical context, and the way which the two are described in a beautiful, tragic story, should fascinate students. The book can be taught with assistance from Spielberg's wonderful film adaptation.Note: contains some graphic violence.
    • 3/5
      On the day the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, all European and American persons in Japanese occupied China were herded into internment camps. This is the story of one boy's war, eleven-year-old Jim who is separated from his parents on that fateful day. First living by his wits on the streets, a foreigner in the country in which he was born, and then later joining other British and Americans in an internment camp where he is used by everyone. This is a story of war and is a dark story, which progressively gets darker and darker. It was a good read but not a page-turner nor did it particularly touch me. I wish we had been given deeper insight into the other characters feelings and I had hoped for more by the ending. Nevertheless, a good read and an interesting point of view of World War II.As an aside, I have seen the movie though only the once way back when it came out. I think I may like to see it again, now that I've read the book.
    • 4/5
      A novel that is also autobiography of the auther. Good description of being a kid and a victim of war. Griping enough to make you feel as part of the war.
    • 3/5
      A historical novel of death and war. Ballard has an evocative style and imagery, but I admit his dialogue grated on me. One grows numb to atrocity by the end of the book, and that is its own horror.
    • 4/5
      A young english boy is separated from his parents when Shanghai is invaded by the Japanese and spends the next 3 years surviving on the streets and in an internment camp. The knowledge that the story is drawn from the author's personal experience makes it more harrowing. I did not particularly like the childlike style of writing, but appreciate this style may have been intentional
    • 1/5
      Empire of the Sun. On this, the third attempt to read this novel, I have to admit defeat. I havn’t got past the first 100 or so pages but the story-line is so loose and unlikely that the facts involved get diluted to the same level. If this novel is based on JGB’s own account of his boyhood, I don’t believe it.
    • 3/5
      I read this as a tween, and mostly what I remember is that everyone was starving and there was a scene involving pus. ::shudder:: Undoubtedly a well-written and insightful novel, but all I took away from it was the horror.
    • 5/5
      To get here I need to go back a bit, to when I was about 14. My sister, who was home from college for the summer, my mother and I went to see some Spielberg film called ‘Empire of the Sun’ and something happened to my very impressionable mind. The images stuck—wealthy British expats pristinely made-up for a fancy costume ball sitting inside their cars as the filthy exotic throngs of pre-Japanese invasion Shanghai pass outside their windows, a certain Japanese leather flight jacket, and those P-51 Mustangs, the Cadillacs of the WWII sky. And John Malkovich, the wonderfully-bad American fortune seeker. I didn’t realize quite how much the movie got to me until I made my wife watch it with me a couple years back and every single scene brought along an intense and involuntary emotional response. This story of British expatriates imprisoned by the Japanese outside Shanghai – it’s just so out there, and held so many mysteries, and it somehow embedded itself in my psyche.So, I finally read the book and discovered that it’s vaguely non-fictional, and also that the movie was only vaguely based on the book – kind of like three parallel universes. (The book and movie were equally well done, IMO.) J. G. Ballard, who was born in Shanghai and had never been to England, was about 11-years-old on December 7, 1941, when, among other significant activities, the Japanese invaded British-protected Shanghai. Quickly taking the city, the Japanese found a large assortment of expats, and somehow found a way to separate them out. The Germans and French (France was already conquered) were left alone, as were Russians, where as the various allied-associated expats were rounded up, given a chance to die quickly, and then moved to prison camps. Ballard spent WWII growing up in one of these camps—which is probably the extent of the precisely true part of this novel. However, this much being true certainly it makes a world of difference. Actually, it makes the novel, it makes it real. The story of the fictional Jamie/Jim is as brilliant as it is exotic. The pre-war Shanghai, the Japanese invasion, and Jamie’s survival after getting separated from his parents are fascinating. But the story really begins once Jamie ends up imprisoned, starved, and yet somehow contagiously optimistic. These prisons camps were death traps of a sort. In the best times, at the beginning, prisoners survived on little food, no warmth in the winter and no medicine. The sick were left to die. These weren’t military prisoners of war, but business men and their families, including the children, many of whom freeze to death the first winter. But, as the war gets worse for the Japanese, things get even worse for the prisoners. Food rations get reduced, and there comes a point where even the Japanese guards are starving. And then there’s the post-war where things really get bad. What makes it so captivating is J.G. Ballard’s take. For Jamie, and for us the reader, this horror sequence was a something of a wondrous adventure. No discipline, no school or enforced structure, Jamie is free, and radiates throughout tireless and energetic optimism that can only be found in childhood. But when things hit their worst Jamie’s optimism hits us in a very different way. We can see and feel emotions he was too young to understand, and somehow, in this surreal way, the weight of what actually happened pours through.
    • 5/5
      I often find myself not really reviewing a book but defending it from its detractors. I enjoyed Ballard’s work to the extent that after I read it I ran off to buy another by him. So when I read some of the reviews about this book, I became defensive.I do not know to what extent the book is Autobiographical, nor to what extent it was meant to be. Ballard mentions that the novel is based upon what he witnessed as a child during that period, but I think we are supposed to take that statement lightly. The main character never makes a mention of a sister. Some biographical material on Ballard brought up that after the Second World War he returned to England with his sister.It is a fine point, but one worth mentioning. Other people seem to think that tale unrealistic. I cannot comment too much – I count myself amongst the lucky who have not spent time in a concentration camp. However if we look at the text we do find a protagonist who from the young age of 10 is constantly thinking about war. In the next part of the book he is 14. War as a presence has been around his life for half of it, and War as a very real thing has been his life for a little less than a third of it, through many of what people would call formulative years. I can’t be sure, but I feel his actions could be justified.
    • 4/5
      Author J.G. Ballard was a British schoolboy living in Shanghai during WWII. He was placed with his family in a Japanese civilian prison camp after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. His novel, Empire of the Sun is based on his experiences. The book is told through the eyes of British schoolboy Jim and is very disturbing in his matter of fact narration of his life in the Japanese prison camps. From gruesome details, such as how the prisoners saved the maggots in their rations to supplement their diets, to the corpses floating in the river as people drank the water this book shouts out the message of the terrors of war. Personally, my parents lived in China during the war. Although they weren't in Shanghai, they did have to flee their homes as the Japanese invasion moved west. This book made me realize that they must have seen and lived through some horrible things during the war. Definitely food for a future conversation. Overall, a remarkable war story - be prepared to be horrified and disturbed.
    • 3/5
      This is a difficult book for me to review. While I can appreciate the literary mastery of J.G. Ballard's "Empire of the Sun," I can't say I particularly enjoyed reading it. Ballard's autobiographical tale of Jim, a British child who does anything it takes to survive living in an interment camp during World War II in China, is incredibly stark and brutal. I disliked Jim as a character so much that it sort of tainted my enjoyment of this book. It's a tough look at some of the more negative aspects of human nature -- admittedly with stunning imagery and situations. In the end, it's a book I'm glad I read, but not one I'll ever pick up again.
    • 4/5
      I dislike books that claim to be autobiographies, but are actually fictionalized memoirs. I’m sure we can all think of a couple that have made headlines in recent years. In the forward to his book, the author, J.G. Ballard, writes:Empire of the Sun describes my experiences in Shanghai, China, during the Second World War, and in Lunghua C.A.C (Civilian Assembly Center), where I was interned from 1942 to 1945. For the most part this novel is an eyewitness account of events I observed during the Japanese occupation of Shanghai and within the camp at Lunghua.The story that he goes on to tell is heart-rending, yet inspirational. As a boy, Jim grew up in the luxurious world of a British ex-pat in Shanghai. Then, on the same day as the bombing of Pearl Harbor, eleven-year-old Jim’s life shatters. Separated from his parents in the chaos of the Japanese takeover, Jim lives in the houses of the international district until he joins forces with Basie, a lowlife who admits to trying to sell Jim and yet becomes a father figure that teaches him how to survive in this new world. Eventually caught and sent to Lunghua concentration camp, Jim works the system as he was taught, but is also helped by a friendly fellow captive, Dr. Ransome. When the war ends, danger continues to lurk as Jim strives to find his parents.Action-packed, heart-rending, and inspirational, the story makes for a page-turning read. Unfortunately, my enjoyment of the book was tainted by the knowledge that J.G. Ballard was never separated from his parents and sister and lived with them in Lunghua. The difference that this one fact makes is enormous. Although I can’t discount the vivid descriptions that Ballard gives of wartime Shanghai and Lunghua, neither can I believe them, as I am constantly wondering where the line between fact and fiction lies. Give me an autobiography or give me a historical novel loosely based on the author’s experiences, but please don’t try to pass one off as the other.
    • 4/5
      This is a story of survival during World War 2 through the eyes of a young boy. Young Jim is living in China during the outbreak of the war with Japan and he becomes seperated from his parents. Aged 11 he makes his way to and from Shanghai, encountering Japanese pilots and American airmen.Eventually he is interred in a prison camp where life becomes really hard and he encounters death, both of his allies and the Japanese. Young Jim is confused, not sure what the war is all about and who the enemy is. Time passes, friends die or move away and Jim becomes dissilusioned by the varying reports on the war in the copies of Time and Reader's Digest that he treasures. Jim moves from camp to camp surviving on meagre offerings of sweet potato and rice, constantly asking those around him if the war is over, and if a new one will start. He identifies with the Japanese soldiers, there is something about him that he admires which stays with him even after seeing their rough treatment of his inmates.I had seen the film years ago and really enjoyed it, and although I've had the book on my shelf for years, it's only now that I got round to reading it.The boy in the story is a representation of Ballard himself-it is almost an autobiography while reading like a great war story.Reading this book it was easy for me to see how these experiences as a young boy would inform the author's later dystopian novels that would make him famous. The dank and dreary paddy fields of war torn China are somewhat similar to the rampant boggy jungles of England in his 'The Drowned World' from the 60s.In both stories groups of people are struggling to survive in a changed world.Good one!
    • 4/5
      Very good, very disturbing . . . a view of war without the gloss and/or propaganda. I'm not sure how much of this is Ballard's direct experience, but it could explain a lot of his other writing
    • 4/5
      The author has drawn upon his own experiences as a child interned in a camp for POW's in Shanghai during WW2. After the bombing of Japanese forces on Pearl Harbour 'Jim' is separated from his parents. After several months surviving on the streets he is taken to a camp. This is no light read with detailed descriptions of executions, the effects of starvation and Jim's way of coping amid all the horror that surrounds him makes for a harrowing read. His survival was largely due to his youthful resilience but there can be no doubt as to the lasting trauma of such an experience.
    • 5/5
      What a glorious book that just oozes class and the film does justice to. But then do they ever?This book is written from the viewpoint of a teenage boy,Jim,interned in a prison camp just outside Shanghai during WWII along with other western foreign nationals. Jim goes from a spoilt and luxurious lifestyle to a struggle for mere existance in a fairly rapid passage of time. Yet he manages to display a remarkable resilience, an un-dying spirit and very little malice throughout his terrible experiences but rarely does the story become maudling. Helped by the fact that it is written in the 1st person so you know Jim somehow survives.This story invoked so many feelings, from anger and disgust to laughter and hope, there are occassional dream-like sections but never does the story stray from the teenage perspective. Which is probably it's greatest achievement. The fact that this book while not auto-biographical is based on real situations and the author's own experiences is all the more remarkable. If I had one gripe is that the author, through Jim, appears to have such a poor opinion of the British and the Chinese yet very good ones of the Japanese and Americans did grate a little at times but this did not detract from a great read
    • 4/5
      I watched the movie of this book first before reading it so even before I open the book and skim its pages, I already have the grasp of the general idea and the plot line of the book. The movie was good. In fact, it made me cry so hard so when I learned that it's based on a novel by J.G. Ballard, I decided to read the book. I thought the book would be "just like the movie" but when I started reading… from the first chapter, "The Eve of Pearl Harbor", it hit me that it's different from the movie. There are some certain differences between the two like in the book Jim was interned in Lunghua camp but in the movie he's interned in Soochow camp. Yes, the movie got the same concept as of the book… Japs, World War II, internment camps, sufferings, poverty but the book's more 'complete' or maybe 'detailed' is the appropriate term.Ballard's novel portrayed Jim with more precision that the movie. I found the Jim of the book better than the Jim of the movie. Don't get me wrong there. I'm not saying that Christian Bale (Jim) didn't act well, in fact, he was good and he carried it out really well. What I'm pointing out is the Jim in the book was described better… J.G. Ballard did a great job of creating Jim out of his experiences and imagination. What with all those childlike thoughts that he inserted in every chapter, those never-ending ideas, there's no doubt that Jim is really an amusing child. Ballard painted him beautifully with his words.But despite Ballard's amusing portrayal of Jim, the book wasn't able to induce from me some emotion like what the movie did. I never shed a tear while reading the book. I expected that I would cry while reading but then, maybe Ballard didn't intend his readers to be moved to emotions by his book. I guess his sole intention of telling the story of Jim is to dig up and remember his buried past in China particularly in Shanghai and in the internment camp where he and his parents lived for several years.I think the book is a success and I like it. It perfectly depicted the Second World War in the eyes of a child like Jim. The movie is also good in a different way. The book is better but the movie has a better ending. Gosh, I cried a bucketful of tears during the ending of the movie. The book and the movie are both a masterpiece in its own way.
    • 4/5
      I had previously seen the film, but not recalled any strong details, except the image of a boy behind a wire fence and planes flying low in the sky.This edition had notes from the author at the back, which gave some context to the story. He was so convinced that the atomic bomb was the correct way to end the war, that I put the book down, also convinced by his knowledge, against my previous thoughts. Then next morning I turned on the tv struck by the situation that we live in. I hope no-one in power comes to the same conclusion. The book deals with the messy consequences of war in Shanghai. We don't always learn about or understand this part of the 2nd world war. Its the story of his internment as a young boy and his boys own struggle to survive the hunger and random acts of violence, committed by all sorts of people.
    • 4/5
      I give this one 3.5 stars but alas because no half stars are allowed 4 stars it is.

      Jim is suddenly separated from his parents during WWII in China. Young Jim is then forced to survive the horrors of war on his own. Without any adults willing to help him and because of his European descent Jim is sent off to a Japanese concentration camp until the end of the war.

      This book was a bit hard for me to read because it is written through the eyes of a young child experiencing some really difficult situations. He gets taken advantage of many times due to his innocence but it is his innocence that really helps him get through such tough situations. Although I admittedly did not enjoy every aspect of the book it left me with some great images and really got me thinking about the repercussions of war especially on the psyche of young children.
    • 4/5
      This book was quite interesting as it told a story about a young boy who had to learn to adapt to different situations in order to survive through a war.
    • 3/5
      I failed to get as much out of this one as others have. It is a good tale of survival and highlights the experience of those Western expats who found themselves in the path of the Japanese onslaught, but it didn't provide me the insight into Shanghai itself that I was hoping for. I'll blame this on my own bias, since having been an expat in Shanghai, I was looking for something that was as fascinating as Georges Spunt's extraordinary account of his youth in Shanghai, A Place in Time.
    • 4/5
      Great book and one of those which encouraged to write my novels of this time and place
    • 3/5
      Empire of the Sun was, for me, quite a difficult read. I found it quite disturbing and the images it conjured up were harsh and sometimes quite shocking. In that sense, I suppose it is a fairly accurate representation of what times were like in Shanghai during WWII.Jim was a likeable enough character, but some of the others I did not care for - I wasn't particularly fond of Basie, I thought he was a bit of a user. I struggled to concentrate on the book at times, and found myself easily distracted.
    • 4/5
      Enthralling true account of survival.
    • 4/5
      I understood that this novel was based around the real life experiences of the author's childhood in Shanghai but although this is a fine and absorbing read I encountered a problem that prevented me from warming to it entirely. I didn't believe it! The boy's reactions to his sudden wrenching away from two loving parents in a highly-priviledged and upper-class gated colonial community into the horror of Japanese invasion just didn't seem likely. He immediately becomes a self-reliant street urchin who suffers no disabilitating mourning for his parents nor his former comforts. He adapts and comforms with a hard-nosed resilience that I find hard to accept he would have possessed. Consequently, I had a slight worry about unreliable narrative syndrome, in a text that flaunted its verisimilitude.
    • 4/5
      I came late to J. G. Ballard. Like many, my first introduction to him came when Spielberg turned this semi-autobiographical memoir Empire of the Sun into a terrific film starring a young Christian Bale. Though I didn't go looking for it, when I ran across a copy in a used bookshop, I didn't hesitate to pick it up.

      The book, of course, tells the story of a young English boy, the son of a diplomat stationed in Shanghai, who is separated from his parents in the confusion of the Japanese takeover of China after the Pearl Harbor bombing. The boy spends the rest of the war in a series of prison camps, learning along the way to fend for himself.

      The film itself pays remarkably fealty to the novel, with the exception I suppose that the book takes things just a bit further, with young Jamie saying farewell to China and moving to England (a country both he and the young J. G. Ballard had never been to). I was delighted to learn afterward there was a sequel, finding a paperback copy of The Kindness of Women in that very same used bookshop, and it is to this day one of the best books I've ever read.

      After that came the easy ones that can be found in most any bookstore: Rushing to Paradise, in which a group of idealistic environmentalists decide to create their own society on a tropical island with disastrous (and predictable) results; Crash (later made into a film by David Cronenberg) in which Ballard himself is the main character, who becomes strangely fixated on (and stimulated by) automobile crashes; and Concrete Jungle, a brilliant updating of Robinson Crusoe, in which a man's car veers off a heavily traveled highway and down into a ravine.

      Some of his earlier works were more difficult to find. I bought High Rise on ebay, a horrific tale in which the somewhat laconic main character watches his condominium building turn into an adult and urban Lord of the Flies. Paperbacks of The Drowning World, The Burning World, and The Wind from Nowhere soon followed, and only then did I learn that Ballard's earliest work established him as one of the finest apocalyptic writers of his day.

      I picked up book club editions of the short story collections Chronopolis and The Crystal World from my trusty used bookshop (The Crystal World has a wonderful Max Ernst dustjacket, enhancing the value of the first edition, should you be lucky enough to have one.)

      The last Ballard I read was his collection of essays titled A User's Guide to the Millennium, in which he opines on topics as varied as Andy Warhol and the Marquis de Sade.

      At any rate, there are still some Ballard's I have yet to absorb, and for that, I am grateful.
    • 5/5
      Empire of the Sun is World War 2 from the point of view of the British civilians who were left behind in Shanghai and interned by the invading Japanese.Seen through the eyes of a young British lad (the author in his childhood) cruelty seems ever present, and at the same time - or perhaps because of this - totally casual, unthinking. Yet, we see that the actual level of cruelty is rather more a cruelty of neglect, of the British; rather more sheer sadism, for the Chinese locals. The author regales us with the slow suffocation by a Japanese sergeant of a Chinese civilian; the sergeant winds coil after coil of telephone cable around the victim's chest.The film of this book was excellent and very true to the book, I thought. Nevertheless, it is worth reading the book simply for the pleasure of reading Ballard's wonderful prose: During the night the swimming pool had drained itself. Jim had never seen the tank empty, and he gazed with interest at the inclined floor. The once mysterious world of wavering blue lines, glimpsed through a cascade of bubbles, now lay exposed to the morning light.- and here we can see the origin of Ballard's obsession with drained swimming pools that repeats over and over in his fiction. Not that I'm complaining; images are the stock of the writer's trade.Empire of the Sun is the kind of book that one day I would like to be able to write. It's full of images so far removed from what we imagine as "normal" that the characters stand out in 3-D against a fever dream. If you've not read it, it is worth reading even if you've seen the movie.
    • 4/5
      An incredible book. While reading this book I realized I had never heard much about the WW2 in the pacific outside of the American military operations of island hoping and the movies that came out of those events. I found this book very interesting. What was more surprising is it was based of Ballard's actual events that occurred to him during this time. I found myself wanting to so bad to know that everything would turn out well in the end. There were a few missing points in the book that I wish I could know the answer to, like what happened to certain individuals after the end of the book. I'm trying really hard not to spoil the book for anyone who has not read it yet. I felt my mind completely engrossed in the book and I found myself day dreaming during the day and finding myself at Lunghua camp and realizing how grateful I should be that my meal is more than just rice and a sweet potato. Would I say this book changed my life? Doubtful but it has made me more interested to read other books of the same nature, I want to go and read a book of someone who was in a concentration camp in Germany and then sit and compare what they had to go through, I would also be more interested now in reading more books of the pacific world war 2
    • 5/5
      Worth its highly lauded status