Free Expletives Deleted by Angela Carter

the unconscious, something British naturalistic fiction never attempted. I wanted a fiction of the imagination which would tell us the truth about ourselves. I wanted the future, not the past – I wanted the future of the next five minutes.
    One of the results of this desire was that Ballard became the great chronicler of the new, technological Britain. A man prone to thrust himself into the grip of obsessions – ‘I
am
my obsessions!’ – he grew increasingly obsessed by the aspects of our landscape those of us who grew up with the culturally programmed notion of Britain as a ‘green and pleasant land’ conspire to ignore. Motor-ways. High rises.
    There eventually ensued novels of pure technological nightmare –
Crash!, High Rise, The Concrete Island
. These were the vinyl and broken glass, sex ’n’ violence novels, describing a landscape of desolation and disquiet similar to that of the novels of William Burroughs; the fame they brought was of a kind distinctly parallel to the norm of the world o’ books. Burgess and Kingsley Amiscould go on admiring him in comfort, free from the suspicion he might creep up behind them and pinch their laurels, even if the younger Amis, as big a fan as his father, showed signs of picking up a trick or two from his hero.
    Ballard’s thirty-odd-year career as a cult classic is, however, about to come to an end. He has, in his mid-fifties, produced what they call a ‘breakthrough’ novel. No doubt the ‘literary men’ (and women) will now treat Ballard as the sf writer who came in from the cold. Who finally put away childish things, man-powered flight, landscapes of flesh, the erotic geometry of the car crash, things like that, and wrote the Big Novel they always knew he’d got in him.
    Yet
Empire of the Sun
, which is indeed a Big Novel, is manifestly the product of the same unique sensibility as his last major novel,
The Unlimited Dream Company
(1979), and has a great deal in common with it. They share the theme of death and resurrection, the earlier one in a radiant, visionary mode, the later one as delirious obsession. But
Empire of the Sun
is a recreation of the recent past, not a myth of the near future, and the well-loved Ballardian leitmotifs, confinement, escape, flight, have the gritty three-dimensionality of real experience. The novel is even about a kind of apocalypse, the destruction of the British community in Shanghai by the Japanese.
    All the same, the chapters have titles that recall those of earlier Ballard short stories: ‘The Drained Swimming Pool’, ‘The Open-Air Cinema’, ‘The Fallen Airman’. It is a shock to find so much of the recurrent, hypnotic imagery of J. G. Ballard moored to the soil of an authentic city, at an authentic date in real time – Shanghai, as the European residents of that city of salesmen are engulfed ineluctably in war. It was the place of Ballard’s childhood.
    Empire of the Sun
is, very notably, a novel about the fragility of the human body, and the dreadful spillability of that body’s essential juices, shit, piss, blood, pus. It is also about the resilience of children; and about the difficulty experienced by the British in adjusting to changing circumstances. More specifically, it is about one child’s war, and hence an investigation of twentieth-century warfare, in which non-combatants such as children and also the old, the weak, the sick increasingly fare worst. It is about onechild’s war in a prison camp, and how he came to feel at home there.
    There has, notes Ballard, been surprisingly little fiction about the war in the Far East, perhaps because the British lost it. No, he hasn’t read J. G. Farrell’s
The Singapore Grip
, which is an account of the fall of Singapore. ‘Was Farrell there?’ Ballard asked sharply. He obviously doesn’t trust book-based research in this area. A note at the front of
Empire of