shewhomust | Shaun Tan: The Arrival

The Arrival is the best graphic novel I've read this year, a title previously held by Azzarello and Chiang's Doctor 13.

The two books have nothing else in common, except that they use pictures to tell a story. You might hesitate over describing The Arrival as a graphic novel; you certainly wouldn't call it a comic. Writing about the book on his web site, Shaun Tan places it in two lines of influence. His previous books have tended to be seen as picture books, and The Arrival is a picture book, too, but a longer, more richly plotted picture book for an audience who don't habitually read picture books. Shaun Tan pays tribute to Raymond Briggs's The Snowman for demonstrating what a wordless picture book could achieve, how complex and delicate a narrative it could carry.

Tan's other starting point is evident in the physical appearance of his book, whose exterior is designed to resemble an old leather-bound album, battered by age and use, within which the muted sepia images have the grainy realism of old photographs, cracked and faded but full of life. He describes how he gradually came to see the family photo albums in which he was researching the experiences of immigrants, not as simple reference materials for his story but as books which themselves told a story,

It occurred to me that photo albums are really just another kind of picture book that everybody makes and reads, a series of chronological images illustrating the story of someone’s life. They work by inspiring memory and urging us to fill in the silent gaps, animating them with the addition of our own storyline.

The Arrival is like a photograph album from a meticulously documented yet wholly imagined past, though more complete and more beautifully arranged than any real family album could ever be.

The book opens with a collection of familiar domestic details - a folded paper bird, a cracked teapot, a family photo, a suitcase - as the central character and his wife pack for his departure. The grid of small images record their careful movements, their silent gestures, before the camera pulls back to a full-page shot of the couple. There are no words, and therefore no names: they become not anonymous but universal. No words to specify where - and when - they are, either; their clothes are old-fashioned, maybe a little strange, but "the Old Country" covers it - until a double page view of the streets shows the writhing shadows over the rows upon rows of tenements.

This strangeness becomes even more evident with the arrival in the new world, the land of promise. From the first view of the harbour, dominated by the gigantic statue of two figures, each with its attendant animal or bird, leaning forward to shake hands, a new Colossus in a gesture of friendship, there is a disorienting mixture of the familiar and the totally bewildering. It's a brilliant strategy, forcing the reader into the same position as the newly-arrived immigrant. Where a conventional approach would place the reader comfortably in a present in which the once newcomer looks back to "When I first arrived here, I had never seen... never done... Back home we didn't...", The Arrival places the reader at the arrival, trying to decipher the notices, the streets, the domestic appliances. It's a bonus that it also gives the artist scope for playful and delightful imaginings.

The dramas of the new world are the small ones - buying a bus ticket, finding food. The major conflicts appear in the past, in the stories people tell of how they have come here, and why. Excitement is something they hope to have left behind. It's a pleasure to be reminded that the story of arrival can also be a happy one.