Off the Warpath : THE KINDNESS OF WOMEN, <i> By J. G. Ballard (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $19.95; 343 pp.)</i>

In 1937, when the Japanese fleet was poised to attack Shanghai, J. G. Ballard would bicycle down from the International Quarter each day to see if the war had begun. He was 7; he had the Chinese and Japanese armies lined up in lead on the floor of his bedroom; he knew precisely what Chiang Kai-shek should be doing, and hoped that his father, an English businessman, would pass his war plans along to the Generalissimo. But his parents hardly talked about the situation, at least in front of him; they talked of other things and went to parties, frivolously. “At times it seemed to me that I was keeping the war alive single-handedly.”

He was a severe and pompous junior warrior, as an introspective 7-year-old can be, though only in the impregnable security of his home. Little Ballard, though, was neither impregnable nor secure. His war games turned real. He and his bicycle were reconnoitering among a crowd at the waterfront when a bomb fell and killed 1,000 people. When Britain and Japan went to war a few years later, he found himself, separated from his parents, in the Lunghua prison camp outside Shanghai.

From this experience, which was to make a lifelong imprint on his sensibility, Ballard wrote a magical and hallucinatory novel, “Empire of the Sun.” Now he has written what is a complement and sequel, in part; and in part, an effort to treat the same experience in a fashion that is both more personal and more matter-of-fact. He traces its hold over a painful and agitated life as a writer, husband, widower-father and witness to the chaos of his times through the ‘50s and ‘60s, and down to the present.

“The Kindness of Women,” like its predecessor, is a hybrid of fact and fiction. With more years and more facts to cover, the joints are less seamless. Nevertheless, a powerful imaginative vision infuses it, a split vision suggested in the first book and developed more fully here.

The split is between violence and tenderness, between the inhuman destructiveness of large historical events and the insistent healing of small, personal ones. It is a harsh chiaroscuro with no softening intermediate tones, and no way to encompass or reconcile the extremes.

The war tore the child from his parents and placed him, a temporary orphan, among strangers in the prison camp. Yet he flourished, cared for in a rough fashion by the other English families, yet free as Kim or Peter Pan; making nightly rounds with his chessboard for a game or a gossip, taunting the passive Japanese guards, stealing extra rations which--a boy’s dream of Robin Hood--he would distribute to the old and infirm.

Then came Hiroshima and the war’s end. He imagines he sees the light from the nuclear explosion; it is the book’s central image and it will reappear throughout. It is an ambiguous light. It stands for the impersonal power and deadliness of a new age. Yet, as he learns later, the Japanese had planned to execute their prisoners when they retreated; only the sudden and dreadful marvel of technology saved his life.

It is a dichotomy that would set this life on a course of drastic oscillation between the spirit of the times and a hard-won, slowly learned, periodically threatened time of the spirit.

At Cambridge, he studies medicine for a while and dissects an elderly woman. In the spirit of scientific learning--science is the new age and saved him--he cuts and cuts until she disappears. His scalpel has known her as intimately as science can know anything; and it knows nothing. She was, he learns, a person, a much-loved physician who donated her body to help others.

Giving up medicine, he joins the RAF and goes to Canada for training. Hiroshima keeps its baleful and problematic hold; he hopes to fly bombers carrying nuclear weapons and be a part of a historical confrontation that, back in the 1950s, seemed almost inevitable. Flying over a frozen lake, he sees the submerged wreckage of a training craft with its dead pilot inside. This jars him back to civilian life. His personal mythology, he decides, must come not out of planes and world wars “but out of the smallest affections and kindnesses.”

He marries Miriam; they move to a quiet suburb on the Thames, and have three children. He writes lyrically about the pastoral intimacy of those years, the light--the different light and the same--over the river. Then on vacation, Miriam dies in a freak accident.

He is pulled from his trance-like mourning by his friends in the arts--he has begun to write--and the media. It is the 1960s; they are into drugs, sexual freedom and mind expansion. Sally, an American hippie, rouses him with her uninhibited dazzle, her experimental gusto and even her promiscuity. They free him from grief into a world of contingency where people can invent themselves and be what they want to be.

“Curiously, Sally’s open infidelities had helped to ease my memories of Miriam, as if her death had been an infidelity of a special kind,” he writes. He experiments with LSD; he organizes a wildly controversial exhibition of car wrecks which, in their impersonal violence and the passivity with which they are taken for granted, seems to express the spirit of the times where “thermonuclear explosions and soft drink commercials coexist” and where “the death of feeling and of emotion has at last left us free to pursue our own psychopathologies as a game.”

He is on a knife-edge, though, between participation and revulsion. One friend is institutionalized; another, stricken with cancer, tries to organize a television series around his own death. Jim--Ballard’s narrative figure--pulls away from the deadly glare of the times. He finds peace with Cleo, a neighbor who has helped him rear his children.

“The Kindness of Women” is an uneven book, but evenness has never been a Ballard virtue. It is told in a series of tableaux over the years, and some work better than others. A visit to Brazil, where he attends a highly decadent film festival, is written with little real sense of place; it is macabre but slick.

The mixture of fictional and autobiographical elements generally works very well--Ballard’s fiction is a kind of hyperreality--but sometimes there is a clash. In particular, the succession of women who represent to him the quiet pull of life over the vortex of historical nightmare can seem repetitive and even stagy. Why do they all, inevitably, go to bed with him at least once; even a childhood nanny who turns up, at the end, in her 60s? If it did happen, then it did; but fictionally, it strains a point or two.

Unevenness aside, “Kindness” shares another Ballard characteristic: an extraordinary illumination. It is not the masterpiece that “Empire of the Sun” was, but it is very powerful. Ballard’s candle, flickering down the galleries of his torments and reconciliations, lights up the human and inhuman history of our times.