The Arrival

by Shaun Tan. Scholastic / Arthur A. Levine Books, publisher. $19.99.

The Arrival’s visual narrative includes no “text” in the traditional sense, but that doesn’t mean written language plays no part in the book’s meaning. Actually, the book’s half-title page gives a good idea of what it’s about. Tucked between the flyleaf and the title page proper, that half-title is not legible in the usual sense, which is exactly the point. Though the book’s title and the author’s name, or something like them, do appear, they are in an invented alphabet of Tan’s own devising:

(Click the above to see it in greater detail.) The only legible text on this page comes at the fringes, in the minute form of what appear to be passport stamps or other immigration documents.

Turning to the next page, that is, the title page proper, brings us back to readability. There the expected information appears in more traditional fashion: Roman serif fonts for title and publisher, script for Tan’s name. The effect of making that page-turning is to work further in, from mystery to understanding, like a newcomer to a strange new world. That of course is what the book is “about,” if we can say that any book so rich is reducibly “about” one thing. The Arrival is a story of immigrants.

I’d say that the experience of reading The Arrival has a lot to do with the way it’s packaged. The book’s cover mimics the torn leather spine and worn boards of an old, old book, a scrapbook maybe: a conceit maintained throughout by the faux-weathering of pages, the rendering of seemingly taped or pasted-in documentary scraps, and the graphic invocation of old photos (this is but one example of a kind of antiquing now popular in picture books: see for instance Christopher Bing’s work). The endpapers consist of rows and rows of postage stamp-sized portraits of people from, we can tell, all over the world, photo-realistically rendered and neatly laid out in yearbook style. The grays and sepias of these portraits prepare us for the book’s evocatively old-fashioned graytone palette: familiar stuff. But there is also an enticing alienness glimpsed in that first approach to the book, in for example the illustration on the front cover, in which a fedora-wearing man holding a buckled valise looks down, I’d guess apprehensively, at a weird, tadpole-like creature (click the below to see it in greater detail):

We see alienness too in that half-title page, with its suggestion of another, unknown language (one in which we lack fluency, putting us perhaps on the defensive). The rest of the book will play out this tug o’war between a familiar, perhaps over-familiar, sepia-toned evocation of a dimly remembered past (always fodder for nostalgia) and a bountiful, leapfrogging inventiveness--and strangeness.

What happens in The Arrival, plot-wise, is that, faced with a gathering darkness, a man must part from his wife and child in order to travel to a new world and lay the seeds of a better life for them all. Starting with a careful evocation of home life and the loving, sustaining togetherness of family (suggested initially through a visual inventory of commonplace objects, most especially a child’s drawing of family and a photographic portrait), the story quickly moves to the man’s departure. He vanishes into the distance on a train, leaving his wife and daughter behind to endure the gradual encroachment of some terrible, undefined menace that threatens their old-world culture. This menace appears (in the book’s first real departure from naturalism) as a swarm of serrated tentacles that, like snakes or the tails of dragons, coil and plunge through the streets of their city.

The second chapter depicts the man’s ocean-crossing, his first staggering sight of the new world (a fanciful NYC skyline of sorts), his undergoing a brusque inspection upon arriving at an Ellis Island-like terminal for immigrants, his confusion and disorientation, and, finally, his securing of a place to stay.

His new world is a criss-crossing of naturalistic detail (the unsentimental and anonymous inspection, as seen in the above taken from Tan's website; the cramped tenements; the man’s smallness and vulnerability) and jaw-dropping phantasmagorical excess: ships float on air as well as water; the man travels to the mainland in a tiny box, carried by a balloon; odd creatures sport on the city streets; the language is everywhere unfamiliar; and so on. In his new apartment, the man fearfully discovers the peculiar creature seen on the cover: his totem animal, so to speak, who will accompany him throughout the book and effectively serve as a whimsical emblem of his growing familiarity and comfort with his surroundings. Small critters seem to play this role for many characters in the book (like the people in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, Tan’s folks seem to be represented and comforted by spirit animals). Subsequent chapters blend comedy, pathos, and terror as the man struggles with the language (at one point he is hired to hang posters, but, because he cannot read them, he hangs them upside down), finds work and friends, and longs for the coming of his wife and child.

There’s not much more I ought to say about the book’s plot. After all, The Arrival’s total effect defies paraphrase. Blending photorealism with the fantastical and disorienting, or, rather, using realism to imbue the fantastic with the textural repleteness of photos, the book aspires to a pop Surrealism on par with Chris Van Allsburg's best picture books (say, The Garden of Abdul Gasazi, Jumanji, or The Mysteries of Harris Burdick) or, especially, the signature wordless books of David Wiesner (Tuesday, Sector 7, etc.). Books like Wiesner's recent Flotsam are obvious points of comparison; you could say that, in essence, Tan takes Wiesner's method of pantomime storytelling and enlarges on it, boosting it from 32 or 40-page picture book to 128-page "graphic novel" and switching to portrait format (that is, pages that are taller than they are wide) as opposed to Wiesner's preference for landscape-format pages (wider than they are tall). The taller pages subdivide well, usually into grids of regularly-sized panels separated by wide, white gutters (almost a finger's width). This way, each component image has its integrity, its distinct identity, while still contributing to the book's measured, deliberately-paced narrative. At the same time, frequent full-page and especially double-page pictures preserve the picture book's capacity for ravishing panoramic imagery. Many pages here are just plain stunning (dig the below, reproduced from Tan's website, but understand that, in the book, this is a huge double-page spread):

Crucial to The Arrival's effect is the way its penciled images refuse cartooning in favor of illustrative thoroughness and, as we say, realism (as Art Spiegelman notes in his back cover blurb, these images are graphics but not cartoons). Yet, at the same time, Tan daringly wrenches that realism out of shape. Those pages that are divided into multiple panels tend toward close-ups, emphasizing the mundane details of everyday living (meetings, transactions, domestic rituals, assembly-line work), while the full-page and double-page splashes tend to dwarf the characters in huge vistas of imposing strangeness, both sublime and, sometimes, frightening (awful, in the old sense of the word).

It's obvious from the second chapter on that Tan aims to evoke visually the disorientation and confusion that come with being an immigrant to a strange land. The book's tightrope-walk between the realistic and the phantasmic is part of Tan's way of both distancing and dazzling us, in effect nudging us into empathy with the book's unnamed protagonist as he negotiates life in a bemusing new setting. Yet, obvious though the method may be, it's also terrifically apt: the surrealistic style, sepia-toned reproductions (so redolent of "other" times), and very wordlessness of the book powerfully reinforce Tan’s themes of cultural displacement and, eventually, acculturation. Said themes are perfect for a Frans Masereel-style wordless novel (The Arrival's most obvious genre affiliation: take Eric Drooker's Blood Song as a basis for comparison), in which images continually resist paraphrase and startle us with their dreamlike open-endedness.

Actually I think Tan has exceeded other artists in the Masereel/Lynd Ward tradition, such as Drooker or Peter Kuper, who, very much in tune with their early 20th-century inspirations, often place gorgeous imagery at the service of a heavy-handedness and predictability more suited to propaganda than to nuanced storytelling. Tan also works with familiar types, but The Arrival is different; it unfolds such a patient, multi-layered story, with a handful of recognizable characters and even a number of embedded tales-within-the-tale, that Tan succeeds in moving beyond the stereotypic shorthand to which the genre of woodcut novels has so often fallen prey. In essence, The Arrival succeeds at not being propaganda.

So, The Arrival is ambitious not only visually but also narratively and ideologically. No stranger to challenging content in "children’s" books, Tan is experienced at depicting the clash of cultures in symbolic form. What first brought him to my attention, in fact, was the children’s picture book The Rabbits (1999), an allegory for colonialism that Tan created in collaboration with writer John Marsden. This picture book, which comes from a distinctly Australian point of view, is a startling indictment of colonization, the titular rabbits serving as a metaphor for human colonizers and the first-person text speaking from the position of the colonized. Like The Arrival, The Rabbits bids to defamiliarize settled cultural myths and relies on Tan’s disorienting, sometimes nightmarish images and confounding sense of scale to knock the reader for a loop. Spread after spread offers bracing graphic surprise and unexpected darkness (the book’s allusion to the so-called stolen generations, that is, the colonial practice of Aboriginal child removal, comes as a particular, climactic shock). Yet The Arrival, for all its wordlessness, tells a more specific, personal story. It’s also the more complex work.

One reason it’s more complex is because it sends mixed messages, and works to reconcile them. On the one hand, the book approaches themes of alienation, using potent graphic devices (and wordlessness) to evoke the confusion and loneliness of an immigrant in an overwhelming and cold environment. The Arrival’s abstracted urban world tends toward industrialization, massification, and anonymity, the very picture of a soulless metropolis. Yet, on the other hand, The Arrival’s world does not purely consist of these things, and that’s where the story digs deeper. The book’s is not concerned so much with displacement, alienation, or the loss of identity; in fact it’s not even concerned with arriving, unless by arriving we mean something more than getting somewhere, finding your feet, and barely surviving. What the book’s most concerned with is how immigrants find one another in the new land and tell their stories to each other, in the process schooling, comforting, and taking care of each other.

Consider: The protagonist, befriended by a woman on a ferry, compares documents (IDs) with her, and this exchange becomes a springboard to her own story, that of escape from deprivation and forced labor. This is one of those tales-within-the-tale. At this point the gutters darken and the panels become like tattered gray photographs (as you can see here--click on the thumbnail to see a larger version):

Then, a short time later, the protagonist is taken in by a family whose story, a nightmarish flight from fascism, becomes a seven-page tour de force (here the gutters are pitch black). In the following chapter, likewise, a scene of stupefyingly drone-like assembly-line work (a factory setting out of Metropolis or Modern Times) gives way to another detour that is not a detour at all: a fellow worker, nearly deafened by the factory noise, pours our hero a drink, then, silently, recalls his own passage from dashing young soldierhood, through warfare and slaughter, to his near-crippling (he has lost a leg). This is the book’s most ghastly interval. Then, after what seems a moment’s hesitation, the old man invites our hero to join him, and together they walk out of the city’s overwhelming, beetling darkness and into another, gorgeously sunlit world: a quick, friendly side-trip, a respite.

This same sort of empathy and kindness is modeled in the book’s final chapter, but with a switch, for this time it’s the protagonist’s daughter who is in the position of guiding and helping a new arrival, echoing so many scenes from the heart of the book. In this light, the world-view of The Arrival is beneficent and profoundly affirmative, or, at the least, the book shows a strong faith in our capacity for decency, humaneness, and genuine reciprocity. Stacked up against the bewildering and sometimes frightful images throughout much of the book, this benevolent view of things gives the book a mixed and exhilarating quality, a feeling of considerable human warmth despite its disorienting Surrealist style.

In every respect, The Arrival is a book of disarming virtuosity. Each element is considered and beautifully handled: from the fidelity, consistency, and control of the drawings themselves (whether intimate or grand in scale); to Tan’s nonstop graphic world-building (a continual bubbling-up of imaginative images, startling right to the end); to the considered variations in the book’s layouts, the understated rightness of its transitions, and its fund of symbolic recurrences, that is, its creation of a distinct vocabulary of emblematic images, objects, and characters. Tan clearly has thought through the challenges of conveying such a rich, layered story sans text, and has devised an elaborate symbolic schema that succeeds in being clear without being, as is so often the case in wordless comics, obvious or bathetic. Most importantly, at least from my POV, the book comes together finally, beautifully, with a wholeness of effect and roundness of feeling that, though reassuring, do nothing to dilute Tan’s fantastic imagery. This is simply a great book.