Empire of the sun door J.G. Ballard

General Data

Title: The empire of the sun

Author: J. G. Ballard

Publisher: Gollancz

Date of publication: September the 13th, 1984

Genre :

Adventure / war

I don’t really have an example from the book in which you can see that it’s an adventure novel but it’s quite logical because the book is about the second world war (in Asia).

Summary:

The book I’ve read is about an eleven years old boy named Jim. He lives with his parents in Shanghai. It all goes wrong for Jim when the second world war started in Asia, and when Japan sunk two ships in the Harbour of Shanghai, Jim and his father tried to rescue the men on the ships. This ended up in a disaster, because Jim lost his father and had to go to the hospital and when he returned home he found nobody. After a couple of months walking through the empty city, looking for food and in the end for Japanese soldiers (he wanted to get arrested by the Japanese soldier because he thought that would help him getting to his parents) he ended up with two American soldiers who didn’t really wanted him but they couldn’t let him down because Jim was injured and he was chased down by a random boy, so they had to save him. The soldiers wanted to sell Jim to Chinese people but they didn’t manage to sell him. When one day Jim invited the soldiers to his house for dinner, they got caught by the Japanese and were sent to a camp for foreign people (mainly British and American people), together with Basie, the oldest soldier. There Jim gets to know that the healthy people will have to go to concentration camps to work, so he thinks his parents will be there to. He wants to go there, but time after time he got rejected. After trying so many times, he was finally allowed to go to such a camp (the reason for this was not that he was healthy/strong enough to work in the camp, but just because he knew the roads around Shanghai). During the trip to the camp, he met a doctor called Ransome. In the camp he spent a lot of time with him. During his stay in the camp, it got worse and worse, because the Americans were bombing the Japanese all the time. The people in the camp didn’t get much food and after three years they had to leave the camp because there was no food left. The Japanese took the people to a stadium, but this wasn’t a very smart idea, because it was a very long trip to walk and a lot of people in the camp were injured. During the book it gets more clear that Jim doesn’t really want the war to end, because he don’t really know what to do with his live after the war has ended. After playing for dead, he returned to the camp where he met some British soldiers who were heading towards Shanghai. After he joined up with the British soldiers they were attacked by people. Luckily, Basie was with the people so he rescued Jim. Jim went along with Basie and after a while he escaped again, and he returned to the camp, where he met the Doctor, who finally took him to his parents.

Theme:

The main theme in the book is that during a war people change, for example Jim. During the war he got mixed feelings about the Japanese.

Title:

The title of the book can be related to several things, but I think it relates to Japan, because the main part of the book takes place in a camp in Japan and in the book, Japan is called ‘the country where the sun rises’. There is also a chapter in the book called Empire of the Sun. In this chapter the bombing of Nagasaki is described.

Characters:

The main character is of course Jim, everything in the book in about him. During the book I got to know him more and more. He is described as a thin boy with brown hair. He loves planes and adventure. Personally I think Jim is quite brave, mainly because he did so many risky things during the book. He is pretty kind to other people, and treats almost everyone with respect.

There are two characters in the book that are mentioned quite a lot besides Jim. First of all, we got Basie, the oldest American soldier that went along with Jim for quite a long time. During the book you can see that although he chooses often for his own good (e.g. when he escaped the camp without telling Jim), he still is a good guy. He is kind of a flat character, because in the book you don’t really read how he thinks, which is disappointing in my opinion.

The second minor character is doctor Ransome, who is a British doctor that lived in Singapore during the book. He always tried to help other people and he spent a lot of time teaching Jim math and other subjects in the camp. Not only did he teach Jim, he also liked Jim very much and they became very good friends. He is a very kind man.

Place and time:

The story takes place in mainly two parts, namely in Shanghai, around the area Jim lives in, and the other part takes place in the camp, called the Lunghua Camp, which is a Japanese concentration camp. The story takes place during the Second World War, and the story takes place in about 5-6 years, because the first part of the book (in Shanghai) is about 1 year and we know that Jim stayed in the camp for 4 years, and after that there was another half year in which the end of the book took place. The story is mainly chronological, with a few flashbacks from Jim.