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Ballard claims that he has “always treated England as a strange fiction”. The real world, in which he was formed, was Shanghai, where he was born in 1930 and brought up as a typical privileged expatriate boy in the city’s International Settlement, without learning Chinese or tasting a morsel of native cuisine. “I didn’t have a Chinese meal until I returned to England.” In 1943, his world flipped upside down when he was incarcerated with his parents in the Lunghua detention camp. In his collection of memoirs, Miracles of Life, published earlier this year, Ballard writes that he was “largely happy” in Lunghua, finding there “a relaxed and easygoing world” that he had not known in everyday life. He claims that he thrived during his two and a half years in detention, “even when food rations fell to near zero, skin infections covered my legs, malnutrition had prolapsed my rectum, and many of the adults had lost heart”.
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June 16th, 2008 at 10:03 am
Actually what Ballard says about the prison camp rhymes interestingly with Montreal writer Ann Charney’s memories of spending two and a half years hiding in a barn during World War II. Her novel Dobryd (one of the best books I’ve ever read, one that should be on reading lists everywhere) begins: “By the time I was five years old I had spent half my life hidden away in a barn loft.” She was everyone’s darling: entertaining her was both a gesture of hope on the part of the dozen adults also hiding there and a way to keep her quietly occupied so she would not betray them.
The novel, first published in the mid-1970s when the USSR was the enemy, never got the acclaim it deserved in part because the good guys are the Russians who liberate the farm where they’re hiding. It ought to be a Canada Reads “oldie but goodie,” it seems to me.
Mary
June 27th, 2008 at 12:46 pm
The Red Army had a bit of a reputation for liberating unwilling young girls from their virginity, so the heroic rescue does sound a little propagandistic. They were also an army quite full of anti-semites.
A Russian friend of mine who was in the Red Army in the 70s once told me emphatically that, “Great Patriotic War was not about stopping the holocaust! It was about preserving Stalinism!”
He’s certainly right about the first part.