He even extolled the élan of the Japanese guards, and recounted his childhood admiration for them-just one of the myriad examples in his work and life of how Ballard always sought to épater the bourgeoisie of a native land he never felt himself to be a native of. In a late conversation he spoke of how:īut at other times he hymned the liberty the camp afforded him: 'We children were playing a hundred and one games all the time' ( From Shanghai to Shepperton, 112). But beside this repression-if it existed-was a relentless recycling of wartime imagery in his fiction: the Ballard mise en scène is never complete without an abandoned swimming pool, a huddling of fugitives, and the detritus of those who have already fled-which is usually employed by Ballard's protagonists as a means of forensically determining their psychological state.īallard's attitude towards his time in the camp remained profoundly ambivalent until his death. Ballard said in interviews-of which he gave many: they were his favoured form of self-mythologizing-that he didn't think of the two years he spent in the camp, and the events surrounding his and his family's internment, until years later when he began work on Empire of the Sun (1984), the semi-autobiographical novel for which he became best known. Ballard was eleven when the Japanese army occupied the Shanghai International Settlement, and twelve when he and his family were interned at the Lunghua Civilian Assembly Centre.
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