Australian artist Shaun Tan tells the story of an immigrant, leaving his family and travelling by sea to a fabulous new country. He doesn't speak the language, cannot read the writing; the foodstuffs at the market are all strange to him, as are the omnipresent animals and birds, and even the design of the clocks leaves him baffled. Little by little he settles in, finding a room and a succession of jobs. He sends money back to his family and eventually they are able to join him; the final image is of his young daughter giving directions in her turn to a newly arrived immigrant.
The simplicity of this summary elides the extraordinary emotional power of Tan's drawings. He captures perfectly the alienation of cultural incomprehension, as again and again the new arrival is shocked or baffled or simply intrigued by some detail. The reader shares in this alienation, as Tan's creation is just as unfamiliar for us as for his character. The alien script (which is woven delicately into the architecture everywhere we look) is constructed of familiar elements (bowls, ascenders and descenders; serif and sans-serif designs) but arranged in unfamiliar forms; the clock (if that is indeed what it is) carries a system of nested sun-like disks. The dining table in the lodgings our hero takes carries an array of obscure machinery, some of which startles him by jetting flame when he picks it up. In a later scene he is invited home for dinner by a new friend, who we see toasting some sort of root at the table during the meal. By subtly reintroducing the unfamiliar, first as foregrounded object of incomprehension and then as background, we are coaxed into the same trajectory of acclimatisation that the protagonist follows.
The recurring animals illustrate this point very nicely. Freshly arrived in the city, our first sight of its details is a double-page spread of eight vignettes, the eighth of the protagonist standing suitcase in hand and pondering the first seven. In one a woman carries a cat-like beast casually in her arms; in another a barber shaves his customer while animals with coiled shells crawl on tentacles across the floor. A street vendor's stall has a basket on the side, carrying something with a pointed snout and spines along its backbone, while birds with high ear-tufts wander at the feet of two street musicians. Certain of these animals will recur, tucked subtly in the sides of street-scene panels or enthroned in gigantic statues. Our hero acquires his own pet, and it slowly becomes apparent that everyone in this city goes accompanied by some sort of animal -- if you can't see it at first, it may be carried in his pocket! By the final chapter the protagonist's own (rather bizarre) beast has become a symbol of the familiar, bringing his daughter her woollen hat so she can run an errand outside in the cold.
As well as this story of our hero's physical (and more gradual emotional) arrival, we are given three glimpses into the lives of people he meets and is befriended by. All three are immigrants, and their stories tell how they came to the city: fleeing a life of slavery, or an invasion by giant destructive figures, or as a soldier who marched away to war and returned to a home destroyed by it. The cataclysmic opening image of one of these stories ("The story of the Giants") can be seen on the artist's website.
This is a good moment to comment on the artwork: it's exquisite. His site contains more images from The Arrival along with similar collections for five of his other books. The style is different for each book, and the realism and soft pencil shading of The Arrival gives it much of its emotional effect.
My only complaint is that Tan has not extended the exaggerated realism of the architecture and mechanisms he portrays to the animals. The animals shown in "Ticket" are typical: they are bizarre and engaging, but they don't give the sense of solid reality that the ticket machine does. (Does our friend's pet have fur, or is it naked skin we're seeing? Are those ears, or wings, or something else entirely on its back? And how exactly do its knees articulate?)
This is really a minor quibble, though -- indeed, it only comes to mind because the standard set by the rest of the artwork is so high. As a small image on your screen, "Flock" is already lovely. As a full-page illustration it's breathtaking.
There are many such moments in The Arrival: moments when my breath literally paused a moment, to let me appreciate in stillness. The departure scene in the first chapter, which introduces the menace from which our hero is escaping, is another. The length of his journey by steamship is shown in a double-page spread containing sixty small, square sketches of cloud formations. The elegance and simplicity of the technique is just as beautiful as the image itself is.
The back cover blurb describes The Arrival as a graphic novel. It's a term I dislike, and it seems odd here to describe a book that can be read comfortably in two hours as any kind of "novel". The name "comic" is equally unsuitable, unless it's used as bait: "It's a comic, but not like what you're thinking…". It's published as a children's book, which it isn't either. It's a quiet story with a lot of deep emotion and warmth, told beautifully, without using words.
Australian artist Shaun Tan tells the story of an immigrant, leaving his family and travelling by sea to a fabulous new country. He doesn't speak the language, cannot read the writing; the foodstuffs at the market are all strange to him, as are the omnipresent animals and birds, and even the design of the clocks leaves him baffled. Little by little he settles in, finding a room and a succession of jobs. He sends money back to his family and eventually they are able to join him; the final image is of his young daughter giving directions in her turn to a newly arrived immigrant.
The simplicity of this summary elides the extraordinary emotional power of Tan's drawings. He captures perfectly the alienation of cultural incomprehension, as again and again the new arrival is shocked or baffled or simply intrigued by some detail. The reader shares in this alienation, as Tan's creation is just as unfamiliar for us as for his character. The alien script (which is woven delicately into the architecture everywhere we look) is constructed of familiar elements (bowls, ascenders and descenders; serif and sans-serif designs) but arranged in unfamiliar forms; the clock (if that is indeed what it is) carries a system of nested sun-like disks. The dining table in the lodgings our hero takes carries an array of obscure machinery, some of which startles him by jetting flame when he picks it up. In a later scene he is invited home for dinner by a new friend, who we see toasting some sort of root at the table during the meal. By subtly reintroducing the unfamiliar, first as foregrounded object of incomprehension and then as background, we are coaxed into the same trajectory of acclimatisation that the protagonist follows.
The recurring animals illustrate this point very nicely. Freshly arrived in the city, our first sight of its details is a double-page spread of eight vignettes, the eighth of the protagonist standing suitcase in hand and pondering the first seven. In one a woman carries a cat-like beast casually in her arms; in another a barber shaves his customer while animals with coiled shells crawl on tentacles across the floor. A street vendor's stall has a basket on the side, carrying something with a pointed snout and spines along its backbone, while birds with high ear-tufts wander at the feet of two street musicians. Certain of these animals will recur, tucked subtly in the sides of street-scene panels or enthroned in gigantic statues. Our hero acquires his own pet, and it slowly becomes apparent that everyone in this city goes accompanied by some sort of animal -- if you can't see it at first, it may be carried in his pocket! By the final chapter the protagonist's own (rather bizarre) beast has become a symbol of the familiar, bringing his daughter her woollen hat so she can run an errand outside in the cold.
As well as this story of our hero's physical (and more gradual emotional) arrival, we are given three glimpses into the lives of people he meets and is befriended by. All three are immigrants, and their stories tell how they came to the city: fleeing a life of slavery, or an invasion by giant destructive figures, or as a soldier who marched away to war and returned to a home destroyed by it. The cataclysmic opening image of one of these stories ("The story of the Giants") can be seen on the artist's website.
This is a good moment to comment on the artwork: it's exquisite. His site contains more images from The Arrival along with similar collections for five of his other books. The style is different for each book, and the realism and soft pencil shading of The Arrival gives it much of its emotional effect.
My only complaint is that Tan has not extended the exaggerated realism of the architecture and mechanisms he portrays to the animals. The animals shown in "Ticket" are typical: they are bizarre and engaging, but they don't give the sense of solid reality that the ticket machine does. (Does our friend's pet have fur, or is it naked skin we're seeing? Are those ears, or wings, or something else entirely on its back? And how exactly do its knees articulate?)
This is really a minor quibble, though -- indeed, it only comes to mind because the standard set by the rest of the artwork is so high. As a small image on your screen, "Flock" is already lovely. As a full-page illustration it's breathtaking.
There are many such moments in The Arrival: moments when my breath literally paused a moment, to let me appreciate in stillness. The departure scene in the first chapter, which introduces the menace from which our hero is escaping, is another. The length of his journey by steamship is shown in a double-page spread containing sixty small, square sketches of cloud formations. The elegance and simplicity of the technique is just as beautiful as the image itself is.
The back cover blurb describes The Arrival as a graphic novel. It's a term I dislike, and it seems odd here to describe a book that can be read comfortably in two hours as any kind of "novel". The name "comic" is equally unsuitable, unless it's used as bait: "It's a comic, but not like what you're thinking…". It's published as a children's book, which it isn't either. It's a quiet story with a lot of deep emotion and warmth, told beautifully, without using words.