Empire of the Sun

Jim is fascinated by ruins. One of his favorite places to go at the novel’s start is the abandoned aerodrome at Hungjao, “a place of magic for Jim where the air ran with dreams and excitement” (19). This airfield, once used by the Chinese air force to attack the invading Japanese, is itself a ruin. But it also contains other ruins. Notably, there is a crashed Japanese fighter plane, “a cave of rusting metal” (20) which Jim sits in, imagining himself to be a pilot. Similarly, “Jim always longed to climb aboard the freighters and explore their drowned cabins, a world of forgotten voyages overgrown by grottoes of rust” (27). He is attracted by the ruins of ships on the Whangpoo river. He even prioritizes getting to a disused freighter above safety, his hunger, and finding his parents.

On one level, this fascination reflects a boy’s natural curiosity toward the unknown. Ruins and abandoned ships or airfields provide the mystique of exciting past events and a fertile playground for the body and imagination. On another level, these ruins emphasize Ballard’s interest in decay. They symbolize the liminal spaces between life and death, seen many times during the novel, which subvert ordinary notions of presence and absence and the strict boundaries between them. For example, Jim sees the skeletons of dead Chinese civilians poking up from the mud. He remarks that “in many ways these skeletons were more alive than the peasant-farmers who had briefly tenanted their bones” (18). In turn, ostensibly living humans often come to resemble skeletons. Jim describes how the “emaciated ribs” of a starving British soldier “were like a birdcage in which Jim could almost see his heart fluttering” (89). In this way, Ballard emphasizes how death is not, as usually thought, a discreet, absolute event. Rather, it is a gradual process separating a person more and more from the living. One can be technically living but already dead, as Jim comes to understand later. On the other hand, that which is technically “dead,” like the countless wrecks, human and metal, can continue to haunt the living.