J. G. Ballard · 1984 · survival

J. G. Ballard's 1984 novel, drawn from his own childhood. Jim is eleven, English and comfortable in the Shanghai International Settlement when the Japanese take the city on the morning of Pearl Harbor. Separated from his parents, he spends three years learning to survive - and comes to love the aircraft and the war that are destroying everything around him.

1. 1
   Amherst Avenue

   The Ballard house in the western suburbs, with its amahs, its Packard and its drained swimming pool - the pool being the image the whole novel starts from, an emptied thing that once held a comfortable life.

2. 2
   Hungjao

   Out beyond the western edge lies the abandoned aerodrome and the trenches of the 1937 battle, where Jim wanders among burial mounds and wrecked aircraft - already more interested in planes than in the adults around him.

3. 3
   The Bund

   On the morning of Pearl Harbor the Japanese sink HMS Petrel in the Whangpoo and take the Settlement, and in the panic on the Bund Jim loses his parents - and begins weeks of scavenging alone through abandoned houses.

4. 4
   Nantao

   Picked up at last with the American seamen Frank and Basie, Jim is held in the detention centre in the old Chinese city - fever-ridden, and the point at which he stops being a boy with a family and becomes a prisoner.

5. 5
   Lunghua Camp

   Three years in the camp beside Lunghua airfield, where Jim runs errands, trades, studies Latin with Dr Ransome and watches the Mustangs come in low over the wire - and is, in his way, almost happy there.

6. 6
   The Olympic Stadium

   With the war ending and the food gone, the prisoners are marched to a stadium at Nantao stacked with looted furniture and grand pianos - and many of them die on the road, which Jim records without visible emotion.

7. 7
   Shanghai

   He walks back to a Lunghua that will not let him in, lives among the airdropped Spam and the gangs in a city with no authority left, and is finally returned to parents who do not quite recognise the child they lost.

8. 8
   Woosung

   The Arrawa carries him down the Whangpoo and out past Woosung into the Yangtze, bound for an England he has never seen - and the coffins of the Chinese dead drift out with the tide alongside the ship.