Book Review: Miracles of Life
Recently a friend of mine and I got to talking about the films of Christian Bale, and my friend said she wanted to see all of them. I asked if she had seen Empire of Sun and found she hadn’t. So of course, i brought out the DVD and we sat down and watched it straight through (over two days).
Now watching this film straight through is something I very rarely do — so much so that some years ago, when I began at the beginning, I barely remembered parts of it at all. There are also sections that it took me numerous viewings to understand — such as the fact that the doctor in the scene on the roof does not actually need help in the hospital or the fact that the Americans may not actually have been setting pheasent traps, but rather planning an escape. (Although I recently realized that John Malkovich flies forward in the end not because he jumped but because he tripped over the pheasent trap). That said, I always liked that the Americans bet on Jim’s survival, that he turns from a spoiled rich kid into a self-reliant scrounger — and I’ve always felt that the camera angle during the scene where the Japanese soldier nearly captures him is forced. If someone is patrolling above you, all they have to do is look down at their just once, and they would have seen you.
After the movie, I looked online for paperbacks of Empire of the Sun, which for some reason I’ve done more than once, even though I’ve owned a copy for years. I skip around in it, and almost never read it straight through, but like the movie, there are parts I really enjoy. Like the movie, the book does such a wonderful job of world-building, and by the time you reach the end, you know all the people in it and a very good idea of living conditions. Although sometimes, I want to yank the author out of the book and say “Enough already! Then what happened?”
The author is J.G. Ballard. In the past, I’ve found a few of his science-fiction novels, for which I had almost no interest, and in the last couple of years, searching for Empire of the Sun, found a sequel, The Kindness of Women. I was very interested, since the novel Empire of the Sun was semi-autobiographical, at what happened next when Jim is sent to England, after absorbing everything that happened in internment camp. So I eagerly went and got it from the library.
Big mistake.
I hated it. I have, in fact, never checked it out again, and remember little about it, except that bits of the internment camp are described, with strange conversations between characters that never seem to read right to me — in contrast to Empire of the Sun, which does. Descriptions and conversations are shorter, which is in some ways a relief. The first-person narrative was rather startling, even though I tend to read that more often, because EOTS was written in third person. There are gaps of time in between chapters, if I remember correctly — the author’s time training to be a doctor; the death of his wife from a sudden fall; and, if I remember correctly, numerous relations with women that I had absolutely no interest in at all.
The same material is covered in the new autobiography I found the other day — Miracles of Life: From Shanghai to Shepperton — but it’s handled better. I would actually read this one again, though I still don’t understand about modern art, Freud, or other things in it, it does explain “what happened next.” It also explains where and how the author came up with some of the events in stories and what influenced them. In the movie and book EOTS, I noticed that Jim changes from a spoiled kid to an optimistic but disillusioned child — what I hadn’t realized is that the adults changed as well. Ballard notes the same type of effect as the book Farewell to Manzanar does — that parents and children became estranged in camp because they were powerless. Ballard says that the adults seemed as if they were on vacation, in shirts and shorts, whereas before they were always dressed properly. In fact, I think in the movie, there are adults running about in shorts and I never noticed it, let alone as a social change.
This book is more a summary than one of the autobiographies where characters are formed — but it works. It leads you from one event to the next — Ballard as a young student boiling a rabbit skeleton in school was a highlight — and it explains a lot about what went on behind the scenes. Here, Ballard’s wife dies suddenly from pnemonia, and he mentions girlfriends he’s had, but thank God, just mentions, and then gets on with things. I still had little interest in Freud or modern art that he discusses, but I can understand how these would influence a science fiction writer, especially at a time before television, when things were becoming more modernized. Pictures, it seems, and old science fiction novels, might be a way to imagine new technology to put in a book.
There are also a number of references to people I believe I probably would know about, if I lived in England, but since I don’t, I had no clue.So this book is not as long, as detailed and does not have as many characters as Empire of the Sun. In some ways I think that’s good, because they are different kinds of stories — this one a record of personal history before terminal cancer — but at the same time, I wish, the reader could see the characters of Ballard’s children, wife, and friends, just as easily as it is to picture Mr. Maxted, Basie and Jim’s parents in Empire of the Sun. They are mentioned, and it is easy to read, but even though this autobiography and the other fiction, the other characters are more defined.
Which does make sense in a way…