Empire of the Sun - J G Ballard Reviews

First published in 1984, Empire of the Sun won the Guardian Fiction Prize amongst others and has been hailed as a modern literary classic. It was made into a major motion picture in 1987 with a screenplay by Tom Stoppard, directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Christian Bale, John Malkovich and Miranda Richardson. Set in China as the Japanese ...  Read the complete review

Empire of the Sun is one of JG Ballard's more accessible books. Semi autobiographical, it tells the story of a young boy, Jim, and his experiences in Shanghai during World War Two. Ballard was the same age as Jim and was also interred for the duration of the war. How many of the events in the book are taken directly from his experience is not ...  Read the complete review

Sometimes, re-reading a favourite book, one suddenly makes a new connection, gains a new insight and this will add another piece to the jigsaw in one's mind. A little bit more of the overall pattern, the big picture slips into place. What one thinks, how one sees things, becomes just a little clearer. Do you know what ...  Read the complete review

Ballard?s tale of a young boy held in a Japanese internment camp after the fall of Shanghai during the Second World War obviously draws heavily from his own experiences. Ballard himself was held in Lunghua Camp from 1942-1945 and while reading the book it is brought home to the reader that similar events really did occur to a young boy and the ...  Read the complete review

There are books in this world that are read, and the reader feels as if they’ve read it somewhere before. You know the kind I mean. The one’s that seem so familiar that you need to double-check the blurb on the back of the cover to make sure. This doesn’t make a book bad, but it doesn’t really make it original. I ...  Read the complete review

While captioned a novel, J. G. Ballard's Empire of the Sun is very much a true life memoir. In this book (made into a film by Steven Spielberg), Ballard first tells the life of a boy ("Jim") in pre-Pearl Harbor Shanghai, the privileged young son of an English business executive. When the war begins, Jim and his parents are separated, ...  Read the complete review

If you have only ever watched the movie then I would recommend that you go and get yourself a copy of this book and start reading it. The story is harsh but beautiful The young protagonist, in love with aviation but imprisoned in a surreal wartime China, is sympathetic and identifiable yet at the same time he appears oddly apart. The book's ...  Read the complete review

This was a novel that I couldn't put down from beginning to end. Although I read it quite a long time ago, I still remember much of the novel, which speaks volumes for the quality of JG Ballard's writing. I found 'Empire of the Sun' full of suspense and immensely touching, capturing the bewilderment of a child in the face ...  Read the complete review