He claimed it was fiction, but there’s an affection here. Published in 1991 just before the final onslaught of his suburban terrorism phase, it catches Ballard in a strangely nostalgic mood. It worked well like that, almost as a greatest hits of Ballardisms wrapping up the series like a clip montage at the end of a film. This defacto follow up to his all-conquering Empire Of The Sun was the last of Ballards books I completed on my deep-dive into the author. His memoir Miracles of Life was published in 2008. His 1984 best seller, Empire of the Sun, won the Guardian Fiction Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He published his first novel, The Drowned World, in 1961. After internment in a civilian prison camp, he and his family returned to England in 1946. Ballard was born in 1930 in Shanghai, where his father was a businessman. All this and much more, we see as the attempt of a bruised mind to make sense of the upheaval around it. He plunges into the maelstrom of the 1960s, an instigator and subject of every aspect of cultural, social, and sexual revolution. Then, after settling happily into family life, his world is ripped apart by domestic tragedy. Jim tries and fails to find stability as a medical student at Cambridge and a trainee RAF pilot in Canada.
The Kindness of Women continues the story of the boy whose life in Japanese-occupied Shaghai was described so memorably in Empire of the Sun, it sets those traumatic events within the context of a lifetime as we follow the narrator, Jim, to England and suburban Shepperton after the war.
Ballard’s prize-winning Empire of the Sun, that follows Jim to post-war England. The fascinating, and largely autobiographical, sequel to J.
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