Inner Space

There are two ways to survive a war. Pretend it’s normal. Here, turn a POW camp into a country estate or civilian hospital. If that performance is too difficult or too much, you escape this world by hiding inside the imagination. J.G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun. When weak dream of strength.

__________

Come with me. Come! Don’t be shy…. Let us walk together along the road with these characters. Now, stop here. Rest against this shell-shocked tank - mind that burning hole! - and take a look around you. Tell me what you see.

Recreation had clearly come high on the prisoners’ list of priorities while they packed their suitcases before being interned. Having spent the years of peace on the tennis courts and cricket fields of the Far East, they confidently expected to spend the years of war in the same way. Dozens of tennis racquets hung from the suitcase handles; there were cricket bats and fishing rods, and even a set of gold clubs tied to the bundles of pierrot costumes carried by Mr and Mrs Wentworth. 

Hiding in plain sight. 

What! What! What are you looking at Schloss? 

At those tennis rackets and cricket bats. 

Yeah, I can see those. So what? 

They answer a question that, like the great Yangtze River, meanders all the way through this novel. Why are these Brits so enervated when the Yanks are so alive?

Yeah, I suppose so. 

You are not interested, I see. The bomb-blasted landscape, its comfort of genre, more interesting than the characters who inhabit it; those tropes of fiction, such sturdy saddles on such tired horses, not the light, unexpected delights of literature is what….

Now Schloss, you go too far…. 

Didn’t you compare Ballard to that Pharma character, an illiterate on amphetamines?

I was referring to the Harlan Ellison…. 

I know, Dangerous Visions. It has some great stories, but those introductions! Man, they’re a huckster’s spiel. 

All right, all right, tell me what I should be looking at. 

Those rackets and bats. They tell us why these Brits are so passive. Of course, the most obvious answer, the one that comes most readily to our social science mind, is that these accoutrements are a symbol of the Old World, exhausted and effete, and no longer capable of carrying the burden of this new century, now taken on by a younger more virile people; and sure enough, these Yanks do bed our teenage girls and their mothers. Ballard himself was prone to this view, when giving interviews. And no wonder. When the novel ends it is American Super-fortresses that rain down supplies: Father Christmas in a parachute. The future flies in the sky. The British Empire buried under the rubble of Shanghai.

But we want more than the crude symbols of the social scientist; that amateur artist who, in drawing such poor caricatures, reduces the object of his attention to an outline of the obvious. Luckily, Ballard is a writer, with the talent for the complex and subtle portrait.

Those tennis rackets tell a more interesting story, one that could only be conceived in a work of literature. Who to think of war as a holiday camp? Surely not a miner or steelworker. It’s a view of the world suffused with luxury and leisure. The old man doesn't go to the office anymore, and the household staff have disappeared along with the house, but there’s no need for worry, for these Japs are the servants now; they to provide both food and accommodation. This war a few years out of the rat-race until the British navy anchors at the Bund. Such a mentality belongs to those who expect the world to be run for them; those who follow the grooves made by another’s tracks (these are the managers and administrators of late empire, not the adventurers and the warriors of initial conquest; the contrast with the Americans as much about the different epochs of imperial rule, and the kinds of character each attracts). These passive, weak, devitalised Brits the products not of nationality but of class and profession. Jim’s admiration for the Americans confuses this: America must be great if it allows ordinary Joes to fly the Super-fortresses and Mustangs. Class and country crazily conflated, Jim’s critique as much social as national, though it is the exoticism of the Americans that grabs this boy’s attention. Upper bourgeois types do not have to struggle for life; so when placed in an environment where they must fight to live, they lack the skills to do so. Unable to adapt, they remain strangely the same, thus these odd similarities between prisoners and rulers: always to depend on others for the essentials of life, whether one runs an imperial house or is confined to a wooden hut. This mindset as set as concrete. Three years in camp and such characters have learned not a single lesson; still they take these worthless possessions with them on a march where most are likely to die. Three years! Three years of torturing deprivation and still they inhabit the mental world of pre-war Shanghai. Not even the atomic bomb to disturb these people’s dogged mundanity. 

Jim had questioned him about his escape from Lunghua, but Basie was sly and evasive. As always, whatever happened after the escape had long since ceased to interest him. He remained the same small, finicky man worrying about his hands, ignoring everything but the shortest-term advantage. His one strength was that he never allowed himself to dream, because he had never been able to take anything for granted, whereas Dr Ransome had taken everything for granted…. Sitting beside Basie as he polished his nails, Jim realised that the entire experience of war had barely touched the American. All the deaths and starvation were part of a confused roadside drama seen through the passenger window of the Buick, a cruel spectacle like the public stranglings in Shanghai which the British and American sailors watched on their shore-leaves. He had learned nothing from the war because he expected nothing, like the Chinese peasants he now looted and shot. As Dr Ransome had said, people who expected nothing were dangerous.  

Basie is the novel’s anti-hero. A bad man. No, let’s ratchet that up: he is an evil presence, who would kill Jim if it meant saving his own life. I exaggerate? Think of those scenes in Shanghai, where Basie tries to sell the boy to the Chinese, who at best would use him as a serf. At best a serf…. Nevertheless, Jim has his uses, one of which is entertainment, those word games he likes to play. Basie, it is clear, has a thang about education (the twisted cortex of a servant’s psyche - Basie was a steward on ship -, which in aping the manners of a superior class feels its own inferiority, twists it out of shape). These uses just enough to develop a relationship, producing sufficient emotional connection, for Basie to save Jim at crucial moments, as when a Chinese bandit tries to kill him. We suspect more has gone on than Jim mentions. The effeminate Basie sleeps with a man on Jim’s first night in the wrecked hull; and when he rifles Jim’s pocket is he looking only for coins? Two balls and a cock surely a more attractive currency. No matter. No need to probe this boy’s reticence. The core of the relationship isn’t sexual. Jim needs the attention of adults; a need that expands way beyond the meagre scaffolding that can support it. Thus Jim treats Basie like a parent, even though Basie has no feelings for the kid, whom he utilises to stay alive.

Doctor Ransome is the other father-figure, and the true hero of Lunghua camp. To run the hospital he takes a special interest in Jim, using his energy to help the other inmates: distributing the food, digging the vegetable garden, and undertaking a multitude of small tasks, which include tapping Basie’s ‘commercial' network, a sort of black market, for medical supplies. Jim is not just as an instrument for the doctor. This is a humanist, who wants to care for people, but whose care is tailored to the harsh contingencies of war. Ransome is no fool or sentimentalist, though his idealism at times is too strict, touching the borders of foolhardiness. Not with Jim, though. Here the doctor has made the cleared-eyed assessment that this boy is strong and intelligent enough to survive; and, if given extra rations to maintain that strength, a benefit others in the camp. Benevolence of a highly utilitarian kind.

War scrambles categories, and we come to realise that nothing is ever clear-cut. Thus Jim’s epiphany, when he recognises that to help others is to also to help one’s self. Not even the purest professions - medicine - to have the purest motives; though the doctor’s grim utilitarianism is a world away from the predatory nature of Basie. 

Survival. The only thing that matters. No point sacrificing one’s self for anybody else, especially when they’re weaker, for they - certain to die - will cause your unnecessary demise. Yet inside the camp this barbarism is masked; the inmates living behind a facade of civilisation, which, in preserving the minimum codes of social respectability, allow them to live together as if the normal modes of human life still apply. Unlike the wild streets of Shanghai, where bandits, criminals, communists and the Kuomintang rampage, the camp, because of the Japanese guards, is safe. There is order, thus predictability and some control; all set limits to a person’s greed for survival. A prison to protect these effete Brits from the worse evils of a Basie, who, to live in Lunghua camp, has to adapt to its ways, though he works them to his own advantage. Now just a shady character not some evil gangster. There is just enough order and rations to allow these people to live as human beings. But malnutrition, fatigue, and an army of diseases is gradually killing them off. The British accept this fatalism. Basie and the Yanks, not used to a leisured existence, are not so equanimous, and in striving to survive extract the maximum advantage from their situation: they have no problem in selling their bodies to the women who need sexual excitement. Us Brits just fade away.

Not all the Brits - there is Doctor Ransome and Mr Maxted - while we’d like to know more about those women in those American beds. Basie and the doctor are two extreme poles between which Jim oscillates. Never reduced completely to the savage indifference of the American there are times he rises to the moral level of Ransome, helped by his adolescent idealism and pre-war bourgeois conditioning. Jim survives as a moral animal. But he is no longer the standard issue public school boy of the British imperial class.

Acclimatised to a Robinson Crusoe existence - in the first months of the war he lived alone, feeding off the contents of the colony’s empty houses - and forced by circumstance to be an active scavenger in wild surroundings, Jim has become a sort of hunter-gatherer, who steals - ‘picks up’ - those little extras that ensure survival. Already a little ‘American’. A savage existence puts the onus on egoism, as one is shaped by the harsh conditions around one. It makes Doctor Ransome uneasy. For to survive the doctor must retain some illusions; thus he looks away when the Japanese, to taunt the British with their impotence, beat a Chinese coolie to death in front them. He has to believe there is some basic decency. But Jim knowingly embraces this moral ugliness; the only way he knows to last out this war.

The egotism and callous indifference of adolescence helps. Yet all teenagers need affection, Jim attaching himself to others, even to Mrs Vincent, who resents their sharing a room. This affection, in strengthening the humane bonds, restrains that alienating ego. It’s why he can wheel the food cart around the camp with the louche Mr Maxted. Adolescent idealism. A lust for knowledge. These too transcend that impulsive selfishness. But this cannot be a normal adolescence. This boy’s world has been wrenched from its axis. It is why Jim’s biggest admiration is for the Japanese. The energy of this boy, that vitality that needs to grow, to expand, to triumph, is attracted to their power and masculine strength, with its concomitant pride, cultivated in ideals of conquest and destruction, and embodied in the speed and modernity of their aircraft. 

Professor Parch jumps up: it’s the Stockholm Syndrome. I grab him by the neck and throw him out the door…. Always some professor around to give out some fancy label. So what? What does this label actually tell us? How much of Jim’s worship is due to his prison psychology and how much with a teenager’s identification with the winning side; that adolescent attraction to the military uniform, its authority and disciplined violence? Jim knows he is safer in the camp. One tends to favour the guardians of our safety, though not if they are brutal and sadist. Surely, it is the romanticism of the kamikaze pilots, a surefire appeal to teenage idealism, that attracts Jim the most (captured in the climatic scene, when a Japanese pilot rescues him). Thugs can induce strong feelings in their victims, but in Jim his idealisation has more complicated roots. As Parch scrambles up from the bins, I open the window and throw him a copy of Empire of the Sun. Don’t quote me the Oxford English Dictionary. Read that! He skulls off, fingering the novel as if some ancient hieroglyphic text.

Ballard has written an extraordinary novel about growing up. A bildungsroman, where the  education is not in the cultivation of good manners and the fine arts, but in learning the techniques of survival. Mowgli in a war zone. The Jungle Book for Britain’s fallen imperial realm.

Review: Empire of the Sun