Warwick Stubbs’s Reviews > Empire Of The Sun > Status Update

"Jim was glad that the Mustangs were so close. His eyes feasted on every rivet in in their fuselages, on the gun ports in their wings, on the huge ventral radiators that Jim was sure had been put there for reasons of style alone. Jim admired the Hayates and Zeros of the Japanese, but the Mustang fighters were the Cadillacs of air combat."

"Voices fretted along the murmuring wire, carried like stressed notes on the strings of a harp."

"His knees ached from the constants swaying, and at times he had to hold on to the leather belt of the Japanese soldier beside him. But it last he was moving towards the open countryside, and the welcoming world of the prison camps."

"The real war was ... the old battlegrounds at Hungjao and Lunghua where the bones of the unburied dead rose to the surface of the paddy Fields each spring. Real war was the thousands of Chinese refugees dying of cholera in the sealed stockades at Pootung, and the bloody heads of communists soldiers mounted on pikes along the bund. In a real war no one knew which side he was on..."