Shaun Tan, The Arrival (Arthur A. Levine Books, 2007). $19.99, hardcover.

By Beth Hewitt

One advantage of the relative youth of the graphic narrative form is that there are no worries or premonitions about generic exhaustion or degeneration. One disadvantage of this same youthful condition, however, is an over-eagerness to prove maturity and sophistication, and this perhaps explains why graphic artists and authors have tended to insist on distinguishing themselves from the artists of another literary form with whom they share significant investments—the children’s picture book. While there are significant exceptions (Dr. Seuss, Windsor McKay, Hergé) in comic history, there are notably fewer of them in the last 40 years of both comics and picture books. It was with considerable excitement, then, that I discovered in my local children’s bookstore a new publication from Arthur A. Levine Books (an imprint of Scholastic Books): Shaun Tan’s The Arrival. Like Selznick, Tan is an illustrator and author of children’s books, but the critical blurbs on the book’s back cover are predominantly written by comics authors (Art Spiegelman, Marjane Satrapi, Craig Thompson, as well as both Jeff Smith and Brian Selznick). Their extravagant praise seemed a hard act to live up to, but the book is such an irresistible object (even before you open its pages) that I couldn’t help but bring it home. As it turns out, this particular relationship is one of those rare occasions where love at first sight coincides with a long-term love affair: Tan’s book exceeds the extraordinary praise his fellows heap upon it.

I’m hard pressed to divulge too much, as one of the pleasures is that we are dropped into a wordless space (the book is entirely pictorial, except for the reprinting of a language we do not recognize) that tells the story of a man (a husband and a father) compelled to leave his family to seek out a better life in a new world. In many ways, the book’s invocation of the immigrant’s tale feels almost allegorical, and in this way it reminds me of other wordless graphic narratives that insist on the allegorical. I am thinking here of Andy Hartzell’s Foxbunny Funny or Andy Runton’s Owly. As is the case with those books, Tan’s tale of immigration feels as if it transcends the particular, as if we are reading the immigrant tale as deep structure.

But what is even more remarkable about The Arrival is that even as we read it as allegorical fantasy, we simultaneously read it as document of piercingly accurate social realism. The book (about the size of a classic picture book) has the palette of old photographs, and Tan has somehow crafted the pages with a trompe l’oeil that tricks you into feeling as if you are perusing a photograph album from 100 years past. Tan’s photographically realistic illustrations appear on pages crinkled, warped, water and coffee stained. A combination of tiny (2” x 2”) pictures that take us through moments of time and the large (8”x12”) portraits that situate us in vast fantastical landscapes produces an affect both magical and vertiginous: we are cast into this new world as immigrant even as we voyeuristically watch our protagonist’s assimilation. We peek at the tiny details of the devices and rituals to which he increasingly adapts himself, even as we are consumed by the sublime unfamiliarity of this new land.

Although we might conceive of this book as a crossover title—as a tale that will appeal, as the saying goes, to readers young and old—such a characterization does a disservice to the beauty and intelligence of The Arrival. Sitting next to my young sons, reading this book, we cast our hands lovingly over its pages, and we collectively pieced together its unfamiliar symbols and images, as if as to enact the story of immigration its pictures told. And we closed the book as if it were a story of our family, but also of all families, and the book was all things, including a masterpiece.