The Arrival

AUTHOR: Tan, Shaun

ARTIST: Shaun Tan (illustrator)

PUBLISHER: Lothian Books

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 2006

Publication History

Like all of Shaun Tan’s previous titles, The Arrival was first published by Lothian Books, an imprint of Hachette Australia. In the publishing industry, Lothian is known for its high-quality titles for children, especially innovative picture books that regularly win prestigious awards. In October, 2007, Arthur A. Levine Books, an imprint of Scholastic, produced the first American edition.

In response to the enormous success of The Arrival, Lothian treated fans to a special slipcase edition in September, 2010, which contains not only the original graphic novel but also Sketches from a Nameless Land, a companion volume that explores the creative process behind the book. This oversized box set boasts a high production value in terms of the two volumes’ covers and binding.

Two months later, the Deluxe Limited Collector’s Edition followed, of which only fifteen hundred copies were produced, containing both books and a first-release print of an illustration taken from The Arrival, individually numbered and signed by Tan. All this came packed in a box made to look like a worn leather suitcase, featuring an actual handle and strap. These editions are clearly targeted at adult readers, and comics connoisseurs in particular, indicating a new sales strategy of marketing The Arrival as a premium-quality art book.

Plot

The Arrival, a wordless graphic novel about immigration and its attendant hardships, achieves three things with remarkable aplomb. First, it transcends its humble beginnings as a picture book without losing sight of the simple story at its heart, holding as much fascination for a young reader as it would for a more literary-minded adult. Second, it strikes the right balance between a universal tale and the specific tale of one family, compromising neither its allegorical nature nor its heartfelt sympathy for the main protagonist. Third, the book ingeniously places the reader in the role of the immigrant, confronting its audience with situations that they do not really know how to read. Since Tan does not provide any verbal clues and frequently narrates through surreal images and symbols, readers need the full power of their imagination to navigate the fantastic landscapes of this new world.

The Arrival is divided into six chapters. The first reveals that the family’s country of origin is afflicted by an unknown danger, symbolized by enormous black serpents winding through the empty streets. The nameless protagonist packs his suitcase and walks to the railway station with his wife and daughter, where he leaves them in search of a better life abroad.

The next chapter introduces the enormous ocean liner that will take the protagonist across the sea to the land of promise and hope. After many weeks confined in a small cabin or huddled on deck, he arrives in the harbor of a metropolis, where he is processed along with dozens of others by the local authorities. His physical condition is checked, he is asked countless questions in a foreign language, and his clothes are marked with strange symbols. In the end, he manages to obtain a work permit, and a hot-air balloon takes him to a residential area, where another immigrant assists him in finding a place to stay. There he encounters a strange, tadpole-like creature, which he eventually adopts as his pet.

Parts three and four are concerned with life in the new city. The immigrant struggles with the most mundane activities, such as operating a ticket machine or buying food at the market; however, his real challenge is finding a job. In all of these instances, he is helped by other immigrants, three of whom narrate their own dramatic life stories in flashbacks. The protagonist also befriends a man and his young son, who assist him and even invite him to their own home.

In the fifth chapter, the immigrant writes a letter home, enclosing money so that his wife and daughter can join him eventually. However, many months pass before they are finally reunited.

In the final chapter, we see the family firmly established in their new home. What used to be strange and unfamiliar is now part of everyday life, and the book ends with the daughter helping another immigrant find her way. The family has finally “arrived” in their new country—not just physically, but emotionally.

Characters

The unnamed protagonist is the only major character, and he serves as a stand-in for the reader to explore a unique world that is both alien and strangely familiar. It is to this end that the endpapers show sixty tiny portraits of various immigrants from all over the world, including one of Tan’s father at the time he came to Australia from Malaysia in 1960. While the book aspires to tell a universal tale of immigration, Tan also acknowledges his own family history and endows the protagonist with enough dignity and character to sustain readers’ interest in his fate. The immigrant bears a striking resemblance to the artist himself, for Tan based all of the characters on digital photographs and videos of himself and his friends, which he specifically took to use as reference material.

The protagonist is of Eurasian descent, is in his early thirties, and consistently wears his best suit and hat, possibly the only items of clothing he has left. The rest of his possessions fit into a small suitcase. He is a cautious, reliable, and diligent man, whose friendships are marked by quiet appreciation rather than boisterous shows of affection. A master in the art of origami, he can instantly produce a paper replica of any animal he encounters. Since the overall design of the book is based on old photo albums and archival material, the characters look slightly old-fashioned, as if they belong to a bygone age of steam power and early industry.

Artistic Style

It took Tan almost five years to complete The Arrival, from 2001 to 2006, partly because he was working on several other projects at the same time. Tan had to prepare himself for the daunting transition from drawing a thirty-two-page picture book, his usual format, to creating a full-fledged graphic novel. He found an ideal model for such a transition in Raymond Briggs’s The Snowman (1978); the most important influence, however, came from the “language” of pictorial archives (Ellis Island Immigration Museum) and old photo albums, which have the documentary clarity of evidence, yet remain mysterious and resistant to easy interpretation due to their lack of explanatory text.

The Arrival is a hybrid between picture book and graphic novel. Tan repeatedly arrests the narrative flow to focus the reader’s attention on silent, often very detailed drawings, spread across one or two pages and seemingly frozen in time, which invite contemplation rather than a quick transition to the next panel. Otherwise, he shows great variety and ingenuity in the page layouts, the result of a long and arduous research process involving the use of three “dummy” books in different stages of abstraction to test the narrative flow of the work.

Tan used only graphite pencils (H to 2B) on cartridge paper, achieving the photorealism of the illustrations through extensive pencil shading. He then digitally added colors (a reduced palette of sepia tones, grays, and yellows) and texturing (mostly creases, stains, and blotches) in Photoshop in order to re-create the worn, yellowish look of old and frequently perused albums.

The Arrival includes several visual references to well-known paintings, such as Tom Roberts’s Coming South (1886) and Gustave Doré’s Over London by Rail (c. 1870), and photographs from the Ellis Island photo archive. These allusions contextualize the book in terms of industrial history and some of the major immigration waves in the history of Australia and the United States.

Themes

The most obvious thematic concerns in The Arrival are migration, displacement, and the questions of identity and belonging. Since Tan envisions his new world as a utopian society in which everyone seems to be exceptionally kind and helpful, the harsher aspects of immigration, such as tyranny and exploitation, are exclusively associated with the characters’ homelands.

The book is also about traveling, leaving behind the safety and familiarity of a culture in which everything and everyone is accounted for, and engaging with a new environment that has many surprises in store for the willing adventurer. This fresh look requires an open mind, such as a child’s or an artist’s point of view, that can bring out the extraordinary in everyday life.

Like the main character, the readers are temporarily impaired in the full exercise of their abilities; they become illiterate, overwhelmed by the experience of strangeness that Tan creates through his surreal and densely symbolic images. Even the most careful reader will not be able to rationally understand every single panel, resulting in an interesting exercise in imagination and humility.

As the book depicts life with a major impairment that can be overcome through perseverance and social contacts, it may also be encouraging to disadvantaged readers, not only those who are immigrants themselves but also readers who have to live with disability, illiteracy, or a lack of certain skills. This particularly includes the deaf or mute, since the wordlessness of the novel mirrors the immigrant’s inability to understand the dominant language of his new home or make himself understood.

Impact

The Arrival has been extremely well received across the whole range of publication formats with which it can be associated—picture book, children’s literature, young-adult fiction, graphic novel, art book—gaining recognition and winning several awards in these categories around the world. It calls attention to the picture book as a literary form and firmly establishes the wordless graphic novel as a viable option for tackling serious subject matter; Eric Drooker’s Blood Song (2002) and Peter Kuper’s Sticks and Stones (2004) are two important forerunners of this genre, but Tan takes the concept to a new level. Since he does not see himself as a comics artist, preferring to work as an illustrator, The Arrival is likely to remain his only graphic novel.

Within the narrower field of picture books for young adults, Tan may be the most prominent artist, but there is a noticeable trend developing, of which The Arrival is just the tip of the iceberg. Like animated films, picture books are gradually finding a new audience of adults who are willing to keep an open mind and enjoy the astounding complexities of these narratives, even if the basic story is geared toward children. This noticeable shift in readership is also evidenced by the latest editions of the book, which clearly target a different audience. The same can be said about the two stage productions based on the novel.

Stage Adaptations

The Arrival developed simultaneously as a graphic novel and a stage play, using puppetry, pantomime, music, and digitally animated illustrations. Tan was involved in the initial creative development phase, providing sketches and finished illustrations, but left the actual dramatization to director Philip Mitchell, scriptwriter Michael Barlow, and designer Jiri Zmitko of the Spare Parts Puppet Theatre company. Despite plans to present both book and stage adaptation simultaneously to the public, Tan was late in finishing his own project, which meant that the play came out three months before (June, 2006) and deviated in several points from the finished book. The play was generally well received and won the 2006 Western Australian Equity Guild Award for Best Production of the Year.

The Arrival was also adapted for the stage by Kate Parker and Julie Nolan for the Red Leap Theatre company, based in Auckland, New Zealand, where it was first staged during the Auckland Festival of March 12-15, 2009, under the direction of Nolan. It used pantomime, puppetry, dance, movable set pieces, and various props to imaginatively re-create the visual impact of the book. The play was highly acclaimed, winning six Chapman Tripp Theatre Awards in 2010.

Further Reading

Briggs, Raymond. The Snowman (1978).

Drooker, Eric. Blood Song: A Silent Ballad (2002).

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Flood! A Novel in Pictures (1992).

Kuper, Peter. Sticks and Stones (2004).

Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis (2003).

Bibliography

Tan, Shaun. “A Conversation with Illustrator Shaun Tan.” Interview by Chuan-Yao Ling. World Literature Today 82, no. 5 (September/October, 2008): 44-47.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “Silent Voices: Illustration and Visual Narrative.” The 2009 Colin Simpson Memorial Lecture, March 28, 2009. http://www.asauthors.org/scripts/cgiip.exe/WService=ASP0016/ccms.r?PageId=10216.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Sketches from a Nameless Land: The Art of “The Arrival.” Melbourne: Lothian, 2010.

Yang, Gene Luen. Review of The Arrival, by Shaun Tan. The New York Times, November 11, 2007. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/11/books/review/Yang-t.html.