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The Japanese interned nearly 2,000 people under brutal conditions from 1943 to 1945.Īgain, fiction based on a factual background. Lunghwa Civilian Assembly Centre, Shanghai. Characters mentioned, besides David Hunter (who will recur throughout the book), include Mr Hiyashi (the camp commandant), Peggy Gardner ("a tall, 14-year-old English girl"), Mrs Dwight, Dr Sinclair, Mr Sangster, Mrs Tootle, Mr Christie, Mariner and the Ralston brothers. While some youths try to escape from the camp, 13-year-old Jim attempts to raid the food store with the help of a broken bayonet - in effect, burrowing his way further into the camp. (The governess in the earlier book was called Vera Frankel, and Jim's "closest friend" was Patrick Maxted of course, the real-life Jim may have had several governesses and many friends over the years of his childhood.) Neither Olga, the Russian girl who is Jim's governess, nor David Hunter, his young friend, was mentioned in Empire of the Sun, so the characters and events of the later novel already seem to be taking on a separate, "parallel" existence. Too young to bike, but not too old to ride. In the first of many time-shifts which mark the novel, Ballard has super-imposed his later cycle-rides (probably undertaken when he was ten or so) on the events of August 1937. Born 15th November 1930, at the time of the bombing he would have been six years and nine months old I find it hard to believe he was cycling around downtown Shanghai at that tender age. However, it's extremely unlikely that the young Ballard actually saw the event with his own eyes. Such a bomb did fall on Shanghai it's also referred to in Empire of the Sun (page 25). This is fiction based on a factual background. Yes, those are bodies on the ground over 200 civilians were killed. The Great World Exhibition Grounds, Shanghai, 1937. We are also introduced to Olga Ulianova, "my white Russian govern-ess," and to young David Hunter, "a friend who lived at the western end of Amherst Avenue." Young Jim, described as "a 7-year-old," witnesses the bomb explosion which kills over 1,000 people at the Great World Amusement Park on the Avenue Edward VII. (Page references are to the recent paperback editions of Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women, both published by HarperCollins/Grafton, 1992.)Īugust 1937, Shanghai. In the waking dream that now constitutes everyday reality, images of a blood-spattered widow, the chromium trim of a limousine windshield, the stylised glamour of a motorcade, fuse together to provide a secondary narrative with very different meanings.A very preliminary reading, with comments on the novel's status as a "sequel" to Empire of the Sun.
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IN THE COMPANY OF WOMEN J G BALLARD TV
How do we make sense of this ceaseless flow of advertising and publicity, news and entertainment, where presidential campaigns and moon voyages are presented in terms indistinguishable from the launch of a new candy bar or deodorant? What actually happens on the level of our unconscious minds when, within minutes on the same TV screen, a prime minister is assassinated, an actress makes love, an injured child is carried from a car crash? Faced with these charged events, prepackaged emotions already in place, we can only stitch together a set of emergency scenarios, just as our sleeping minds extemporize a narrative from the unrelated memories that veer through the cortical night. A huge volume of sensational and often toxic imagery inundates our minds, much of it fictional in content. “The media landscape of the present day is a map in search of a territory.