has a human depth and subtlety not characteristic of the bleak world of much
contemporary fiction.
Ishiguro’s Japanese family upbringing gave him a useful perspective on English
society and its codes, and although he passed through the same stables as some of
the English novelists so far discussed, he avoids the promotional circus to work on
his understated novels. Whether this masterly artist can again produce anything
quite as good as The Remains of the Day remains to be seen.
Graham Swift
Waterland(1983) by Graham Swiftis a formidable achievement. A carefully-
mounted narrative, it combines fictional autobiography, family saga and a history of
the Fens. Likened to Eliot’s The Mill on the Flossfor its slow naturalistic build-up,
and to Hardy for its determined pattern, its doomed rural lives and multiple narra-
tion also recall William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. Its highly conscious narrative
method is modern rather than Victorian. Swift’s Last Orderslooks back to the
Second World War, as does other recent fiction.
J. G. Ballard
Periodization can mislead. Long-recognized practitioners such as William Golding
and Muriel Spark were still writing well in the 1980s. In this decade two older writ-
ers made a notable appearance in English fiction.J. G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sunof
1984 is in any sense of the word a terrific novel. It is a fictionalized account of child-
hood experience: Ballard (1930–2000) was a boy when the Japanese conquered
Shanghai, and he and his parents, previously the inhabitants of mansions in the
Inter national Settlement, were made prisoners of war, living for several years in
camps near aerodromes outside the city, subsisting on rations which steadily
reduced as the Americans came nearer. In the novel he is separated from his parents,
and,since he is stro nger and in better health than most of the adults in the camp, he
becomes an expert solo scavenger. In the competition to survive, he is a winner:
stealing food, digging graves, getting the clothes of the dead, doing deals with guards.
Many of the adults around him die; to some he shows some kindness. Often he is
near death,both his own and that of others, and has near-death experiences. He has
a boy’s interest in machinery: of toys, cars, ships, and especially of aeroplanes. He
admires all pilots, whether Japanese or American. The accounts of several traumatic
incidents in the invasion have a hallucinatory clarity. Machines earn descriptions
which show understanding, appreciativeness, even love. The boy observes adult life
around him pragmatically rather than morally. His chauffeur-driven trips around
the streets of pre-war civilian Shanghai, as he was conveyed to or from lessons, choir
pr actice and Latin homework, had accustomed him to the sight of everyday atroc-
ity. The sun of the title is that on the Japanese flag, but also the sun which beats down
on the camp every day, and the sun-like light-burst of the atomic bomb, which the
boy is made to see from afar. The novel has two minor flaws: it edges at times into
the mimetic fallacy, showing a war which was terrible, chaotic, monotonous and too
long, sometimes in ways which mimic those qualities too closely. Also, the boy is at
times given an understanding of the course of the war which is above his years.
These flaws do not mar this unforgettable eyewitness account of what was, among
other things, the end of the British Empire. It must be the best British novel about
the Second World War.
THE EMPIRE OF FICTION 417