''The Kindness of Women'' is a 1991 novel by British author

J. G. Ballard James Graham Ballard (15 November 193019 April 2009) was an English novelist, short story writer, satirist, and essayist known for provocative works of fiction which explored the relations between human psychology, technology, sex, and mass medi ...

, a sequel to his 1984 novel ''

Empire of the Sun ''Empire of the Sun'' is a 1984 novel by English writer J. G. Ballard; it was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Like Ballard's earlier short story "The Dead Time" (published in the anthology '' ...

''. ''The Kindness of Women'' drew on the author's boyhood in

Shanghai Shanghai (; , , Standard Mandarin pronunciation: ) is one of the four direct-administered municipalities of the People's Republic of China (PRC). The city is located on the southern estuary of the Yangtze River, with the Huangpu River flow ...

during World War II, presenting a lightly fictionalized treatment of Ballard's life from Shanghai through to adulthood in England, culminating with an account of the making of

Steven Spielberg Steven Allan Spielberg (; born December 18, 1946) is an American director, writer, and producer. A major figure of the New Hollywood era and pioneer of the modern blockbuster, he is the most commercially successful director of all time. Spie ...

's 1987 film ''

''. A non-fiction account of the same experiences can be found in Ballard's autobiography, ''

Miracles of Life ''Miracles of Life'' is an autobiography written by British writer J. G. Ballard and published in 2008. Overview The book describes Ballard's childhood and early teenage years in Shanghai in the 1930s and the early 1940s, when the city is ravage ...

''. It was first published in the UK by

HarperCollins HarperCollins Publishers LLC is one of the Big Five English-language publishing companies, alongside Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Macmillan. The company is headquartered in New York City and is a subsidiary of News Cor ...

and in the U.S. by

Farrar, Straus and Giroux Farrar, Straus and Giroux (FSG) is an American book publishing company, founded in 1946 by Roger Williams Straus Jr. and John C. Farrar. FSG is known for publishing literary books, and its authors have won numerous awards, including Pulitzer ...

Plot introduction

''The Kindness of Women'' is semi-autobiographical, and discusses Jim's departure from China, where he had been born and had been interned, to visit England, other parts of Europe and the United States. Jim is obsessed with two themes throughout the book: sex and death. The numerous sexual encounters are described in clinical and cold terms. The act of sex becomes a dispassionate observation of the male and female genitalia. Too often Jim is unaroused, and has to be "worked on" by his female partner. When Jim leaves the Japanese camp at the end of the war, he is 15 years old and alone. He witnesses a murder of a Chinese clerk at a railway station, a slow, casual murder, committed by a Japanese soldier in the immediate aftermath of the Atomic bomb. Jim cannot intervene; he knows he, too, could be killed in just as casual a manner. As he walks away towards Shanghai, Jim's life has changed forever. Jim tries and fails to find a niche in post-war England. Failing to complete his studies as a medical student, he decides to be a pilot. But his motives are strange: convinced that

World War III World War III or the Third World War, often abbreviated as WWIII or WW3, are names given to a hypothetical World war, worldwide large-scale military conflict subsequent to World War I and World War II. The term has been in use ...

is around the corner, he wants to be one of the bombers, carrying his own "pieces of the sun" to annihilate and, more importantly, to recapture the light he saw at the railway station, where the Chinese clerk died. He finds happiness in his wife and children but, as a young father and husband in the 1960s, he becomes aware of a certain trend towards violence and the ever-intrusive camera lens. This leads him to believe that the world has become desensitized to the violent images they see on the TV screens day after day:

Kennedy's assassination John F. Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States, was assassinated on Friday, November 22, 1963, at 12:30 p.m. CST in Dallas, Texas, while riding in a presidential motorcade through Dealey Plaza. Kennedy was in the vehicle wit ...

in particular, and the images being screened from

Vietnam Vietnam or Viet Nam ( vi, Việt Nam, ), officially the Socialist Republic of Vietnam,., group="n" is a country in Southeast Asia, at the eastern edge of mainland Southeast Asia, with an area of and population of 96 million, making i ...

. The title refers to women who helped him after the death of his wife, but Jim's view of life is distorted and strange. This makes him ideal material for

LSD Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), also known colloquially as acid, is a potent psychedelic drug. Effects typically include intensified thoughts, emotions, and sensory perception. At sufficiently high dosages LSD manifests primarily mental, vi ...

experiments, but he soon dismisses this. His view of humanity is that of a constant need to view lives and violence, and indeed, sex, through a camera, via TV. Ballard has declared that the book is the story of his life "seen through the mirror of the fiction prompted by that life". He also said that "Most of the characters in ''Kindness of Women'' are complete inventions."

References

Sources

* Rossi, Umberto. "Mind is the Battlefield: Reading Ballard's 'Life Trilogy' as War Literature", J. Baxter (ed.), ''J.G. Ballard, Contemporary Critical Perspectives'', London, Continuum, 2008, 66-77.

External links

The Terminal Collection: JG Ballard First Editions
{{DEFAULTSORT:Kindness of Women 1991 British novels British autobiographical novels Farrar, Straus and Giroux books HarperCollins books Novels by J. G. Ballard Sequel novels