Interesting to read this while I was still in Shanghai, where the book is set. Ballard grew up here and was interned as a boy not far from neighbourhoods I walked through after work. That overlap was stranger than I expected — fiction and streets at the same time.
Jim's war is partly spectacle and weather, which some people find cold; it felt honest to me. Separate from the novel, living in China you sometimes hear how competitive or bitter people can be about America, in ways that sit oddly next to the history of the Pacific war and what the US did in that conflict. The book didn't lecture me on that, but it sat in my head alongside those conversations.
Glad I read it here rather than from a distance.