Volume 31, Number 18 · November 22, 1984
Prisoners & Pornographers
By D.J. Enright
Empire of the Sun
by J.G. Ballard
Simon and Schuster, 279 pp., $16.95
Swallow
by D.M. Thomas
Viking, 312 pp., $16.95
'It took a very, very long time to forget, and a very, very long time to remember,' J.G. Ballard told Claire Tomalin in an interview printed recently in the London Sunday Times. He was speaking of the period he spent as a boy, between 1942 and the end of the war, in a Japanese prison camp in China. Obviously his new book draws on memories or reconstructions of those years. At first it seems that this novel contains no hint of the science fiction he is known for—termed 'apocalyptic' for its diverse visions of how the world might end in disaster or dereliction—and not very much fiction: that it is slightly fictionalized documentary, a record which (as he stated in the interview) he waited until his own children had grown up before writing down.
Review, 2600 words
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