“Wars came early to Shaghai, overtaking each other like the tides that raced up the Yangtze and returned to this gaudy city all the coffins cast adrift from the funeral piers of the Chinese Bund.”
This a roman a clef more or less by J.G. Ballard, or even something close to a kind of autofiction or memoir/novel based on his experiences as an adolescent living in Shanghai, the son of British colonial figures, at the start of World War II, and eventually his time in a large prison encampment of the Japanese invading force.
The novel is narrated in a very close third person which functions almost like first person (so free-indirect discourse) and relies very heavily on the dramatic irony of its adult readers to understand a lot more than Jim does about his situation. Jim is separated from his parents early in the novel by the invasion of the city, and in looking for them, which he seems to take on as a kind of adventure rather than trauma, he ends up in several precarious and dangerous situations that he doesn’t fully comprehend. For example, early on he meets two merchant seamen who are trying to leave the city by any means necessary and see Jim as a possible bargaining chip. When they mention that they might sell him to the Chinese, Jim has something like Treasure Island in mind, and conceive of why someone would want to buy him. This naivete continues on when he ends up back in a camp with other British colonials and never really takes on the terror that they have in them. He makes it through the war, and the novel is relatively episodic in its accounting of his time.
I was recently reading about British children in London during the Blitz, and how the children tended to react to the bombings with the same general air of the adults around them. Those whose parents or guardians were anxiety ridden became so as well, and those whose parents were relatively calm, had children that were so. Jim falls into this second camp, having found in his sense of adventure, a way to deal with the trauma he’s saturated in.
