Australian children’s classics: Shaun Tan’s essential migrant story still mesmerises, 20 years on

Penni Russon, Monash University

Holding Shaun Tan’s 2006 book The Arrival, you get the immediate impression of holding a found object – a family album or personal archive held together by hopes and dreams.

The book, now celebrating its 20th anniversary, is a wordless visual narrative about a man who leaves his wife and child to build a new future for his family. He arrives in a strange new city, a stranger in a strange land. Its story is told in comics form, with meticulous graphite pencil drawings, reproduced in sepia tones.

In 2007, the New York Times called it “mesmerizing” and said it tells “not an immigrant’s story, but the immigrant’s story”. Now, Tan’s central theme of immigration is more timely than ever, as politicans – particularly a resurgent Pauline Hanson – conjure the dangerous fantasy of a homogeneous (white) Australia migrants can assimilate to.

But The Arrival shows the city as a place of intersections, where people from different cultures may meet, interact and help each other – without giving up their identity.

Many beautiful books come and go, but The Arrival has both persisted in Australia’s consciousness and captured imaginations worldwide. What makes it a classic? And what exactly is it?

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Tan, who grew up in Perth (“one of the most isolated cities in the world”) and is based in Melbourne, was born in 1974 to a Malaysian–Chinese father and an Anglo–Australian mother. He has said this experience – along with low-level racism – contributed to his recurring interest in notions of belonging.

He has earned international acclaim (including an Oscar for his animated film of his book The Lost Thing, and the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award) for using surreal, dreamlike imagery to explore social and historical themes in both books and films.

Picture book, comic or graphic novel?

The Arrival defies classification. It can be a picture book in a primary school library, a young adult book in a high school classroom, or a work of high-end art in a gallery bookshop.

For others, it’s a graphic novel. Art Spiegelman, famously the first graphic novelist to win a Pulitzer, and Marjane Satrapi, internationally celebrated for her graphic novel and animated film Petropolis, have both praised it.

This changeability is reflected, too, in the range of major prizes The Arrival has claimed: across children’s literature (Children’s Book Council of Australia Picture Book of the Year), young adult literature (the American Library Associations Best Book for Young Adults), speculative fiction (Aurealis and Locus awards) and global graphic narrative (Best Comic Book at the Angoulême International Comics Festival).

Crossing borders

Language may not travel across borders, but stories do. Embodied empathy allows Tan’s characters – and also us, the readers – to take these stories into our own imaginations, and translate them using our own realms of experience. The main character offers folded origami creatures as a way of honouring these connections.

We hold a folded paper creation, this beautiful book, in our own hands.

The Arrival doesn’t just cross over in terms of form. Tan’s narrative imagery blends historical realism with surreal science-fiction world-building.

It’s grounded in a visual aesthetic that draws inspiration from real archives and historical artefacts, such as photographs of migrant processing from the collection held at the Ellis Island Immigration Museum in New York.

Through techniques of defamiliarisation (making the familiar strange and the strange familiar), Tan combines everyday domestic imagery – teacups, laundry – with strange, alien plants and creatures and technologies, conjuring the experience of being a stranger in a strange land.

Speaking at a 2012 conference in London, Tan described reading itself as a form of migration. Opening a book, he suggested, is like stepping across a border into a completely new world.

This perfectly captures the experience of reading The Arrival. Because the book has no words, readers are placed directly in the shoes of an immigrant. Without text to rely on, we have to slow down, look closely, and figure out the signs, symbols and rules of a strange new city.

Like Tan’s main character, each reader must create strategies to get our bearings, or learn how to tolerate the experience of only half knowing. We learn to attend to what’s around us, how things are sequenced, to understand the logic of the new world.

Defining a genre

The Arrival is packaged as a premium picture book, similarly to Tan’s previous picture books with Lothian (who published this one): The Rabbits, The Red Tree and The Lost Thing.

The notable difference is the length. Tan’s previous picture books are a standard 32 pages. The Arrival is 128 pages long, giving it the expansive scope of a novel.

It is a touchstone text in the turn towards graphic narratives as a sophisticated storytelling medium.

In 2006, graphic novels were still a marginal genre in Australian publishing, but this was about to change. Nikki Greenberg’s graphic adaptation of The Great Gatsby (2007) and Bruce Mutard’s historical graphic novel set in St Kilda, The Sacrifice (2008), had already been commissioned by Erica Wagner at Allen & Unwin by the time The Arrival was published. Boutique press Finlay Lloyd published Mandy Ord’s first graphic novel, Rooftops, in 2007.

More recently, Safdar Ahmed’s 2021 graphic narrative, Still Alive: Notes from Australia’s Immigration Detention System, published by Twelve Panels Press, is a shadow narrative to The Arrival. Ahmed shows what happens when such an arrival is refused and movement is restricted. Ahmed also demonstrates the dignity and justice afforded by attending to people’s stories.

No right or wrong way to read it

The graphic narrative form asks us to reflect not just on the structure of stories, but on the structure of experience.

As we read, the novel presents questions that Tan never fully answers. What do the looming shadows menacing the city mean? Why is this man forced to leave his wife and child? Tan invites readers to use their own personal and cultural understandings and emotional responses to translate what isn’t explicitly told.

This is part of the reason The Arrival works for such diverse readerships. A child may not understand border politics, but they do know what it’s like to feel alone, or to find comfort in a non-human companion. A reader with more knowledge of history may see metaphors or allegories others won’t. But neither is the right or wrong way to read The Arrival.

Tan says the style of the narrative was inspired by the experience of working on the animated film of The Lost Thing.

Cinematic sequences show the passage of time, or a sequence of actions. For example, the main character wraps a photo in a frame for his voyage over nine panels on the left, while on the right he hold hands with his wife on top of the closed suitcase in a recognisably homely kitchen.

We are invited to pause, to take in and absorb this moment as love, grief, fear and hope pass between them. A double-page spread of 60 panels shows the slow transformation of clouds passing overhead, recreating the feeling of slow time on a sea voyage.

Lasting the test of time

What makes The Arrival a classic is Tan’s extraordinary trust in and respect for the reader. The Arrival isn’t for children – or adults. Tan imagines empathetic readers, willing to take a journey into the unknown.

The Arrival, therefore, is not just a beautiful book, or object. It’s an aesthetic experience, where the book becomes the environment the reader adapts to.

I wonder if it was easier take a risk on an unclassifiable book back in 2006. Before algorithms and metadata ruled book publishing, when most bookselling was mediated by handselling: passionate readers putting the right books into the hands of the right readers.

I hope such reading experiences will always be able to cut through the noise, the ebb and flow of publishing trends – even in these challenging times for books. Twenty years after The Arrival was first published, Tan has become a genre of his own.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.