Saturday, July 5, 2008

Shaun Tan's "The Arrival"


I saw on Crooked Timber that Shaun Tan’s graphic novel, The Arrival, had received a prize from Locus, a Science Fiction literature site, which provoked this blog.
The Arrival
is a constructed around the experience of a newly-arrived immigrant (Tan is an Australian of Malaysian-Chinese descent) in a vaguely surreal city: people travel about in balloon-ships, there is an invented alphabet, and the main character is accompanied for most of the narrative by a sort of friendly tadpole-like creature. Tan's world reminded me a bit of the American children’s book artist David Wiesner. Like Wiesner, Tan tells his story without using words.

The conceit—the new world as a variation on Oz—may strike some readers as fey and little too precious, but it also, to my mind, highlights how certain media can provide us with a distinctive aesthetic experience. At some point in reading the book, I started to think about how a literary novel or even a movie could capture the feeling of strangeness and confusion and wonder and vague foreboding that is the experience of anyone encountering a radically different society. I couldn’t think of how it could be done as well as Tan has managed to do it here.


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