The Arrival by Shaun Tan * * * *
I gave it four stars.
The book has a very distinctive visual style. Tan created the final illustrations primarily with graphite pencil and then digitally coloured them, drawing on the look of early photography, old pictorial archives, and family photo albums. That explains the sepia tones and slightly faded, historical quality of the images. At the same time, the world itself is surreal. The people and their emotions are rendered quite realistically, but the cities, animals, plants, machines, and everyday objects are just unfamiliar enough that neither the protagonist nor the reader completely understands the world around them.
We begin with a man preparing to leave his wife and daughter behind and emigrate to another country. We are never explicitly told why he has to leave, but there is an enormous, threatening shadow looming over the houses of his city. To me, the imagery immediately suggested war or political danger, and the setting had a very 1930s Eastern European feeling. Tan deliberately avoids identifying a specific country, time period, or historical event, so the reader has to construct the circumstances from what is visible.
The man travels alone by ship, surrounded by other migrants and refugees, until he reaches an enormous new city. Again, the country is never identified as the United States, and technically it is not the United States at all. It is an imaginary country. But the visual language strongly evokes early twentieth-century immigration to America. Tan has said that New York in the early 1900s was one of his major visual references and that he used historical photographs of immigrants being processed at Ellis Island when developing these scenes. Even the monumental statue that greets the arriving migrants is designed to suggest the Statue of Liberty without actually being it.
From there, we follow this man as he tries to figure out how to exist in a country whose language he cannot read and whose customs he does not understand. He needs somewhere to live. He needs food. He needs work. He has to navigate transportation and paperwork. Eventually he finds mostly menial jobs, the sort of work available to someone who has arrived without money, connections, or knowledge of the local language.
This is where I think the lack of words becomes particularly clever. We are in almost exactly the same position as the protagonist. We cannot read the signs either. Nobody explains the strange machines to us. Nobody provides a helpful paragraph telling us what a particular creature or object is. We have to look at what people are doing and try to work it out from context, just as he does. Tan has explained that this was intentional. Removing written explanation places the reader more firmly in the immigrant’s position because we also have to search for meaning and familiarity in an unfamiliar environment.
It made me think about how culturally dependent visual communication can actually be. We often assume that pictures are universal, but interpreting an image still depends partly on what we already know. At the same time, the broader emotional story here is remarkably easy to understand. Leaving your family, travelling somewhere unknown, being unable to communicate, trying to find work, feeling lost, meeting people who help you, and gradually building a new life are experiences that cross a lot of cultural boundaries.
And The Arrival can be surprisingly emotional considering that nobody says a single word.
I also liked that Tan does not tie the story too firmly to one historical refugee experience. Visually, it reminded me very strongly of someone escaping Europe in the 1930s and travelling to the United States, but the actual experiences depicted in the book could belong to immigrants and refugees from many different places and periods. Tan himself described the project as an attempt to create a universal migrant story by drawing from migration histories across different countries and centuries. He deliberately removed specific names, places, languages, and even a precise historical period so that the experience would not belong exclusively to one group.
That also makes the story feel very current. The clothes and sepia photographs may suggest the past, but leaving somewhere dangerous, travelling without your family, arriving somewhere you cannot understand, taking whatever work you can find, and slowly trying to establish enough stability to bring your family to you are hardly experiences confined to history.
The surreal elements were probably the part that worked slightly less well for me. When the man moves into his new home, for example, there is a strange little creature there that eventually becomes something like a pet. Tan describes it as looking rather like a giant walking tadpole, and it is deliberately supposed to be unfamiliar. I understand the purpose of that much better knowing what Tan was trying to achieve. Everything in this country is supposed to be recognizable enough that we can function within the story, while remaining strange enough that we share the protagonist’s uncertainty.
Still, there were several moments when I could not quite work out what an image was trying to communicate. That openness is obviously part of the concept, but occasionally I found myself wondering whether I was missing something important rather than simply interpreting something differently. That is the main reason this ended up being a four-star book for me rather than a five-star one.
I really liked the sepia artwork, though. It gives the entire book the appearance of an old family photo album, which Tan has said was intentional. He was interested in the way old photographs give us fragments of somebody’s life and force us to fill in the silent spaces between them ourselves. That is essentially what we are doing throughout The Arrival. We are being shown fragments and creating the narrative that connects them.
I did have one thought about the colour while I was reading. I think it could have been interesting if, as the protagonist's life gradually became more stable and hopeful, tiny amounts of colour had begun to appear. Not suddenly full colour, but perhaps one or two muted colours slowly entering the sepia world. Something similar to the visual contrast in The Wizard of Oz, where colour itself becomes part of the storytelling. I think that could have reinforced the growing sense of hope towards the end.
That is entirely my own visual preference, though, because the consistent sepia aesthetic clearly serves Tan’s idea of the book as an old photographic record.
Overall, I really enjoyed The Arrival. It is difficult to review because so much of what makes it interesting has to be seen rather than described. It is a story about immigration, displacement, loneliness, communication, and eventually belonging, told without giving its characters a nationality, a recognizable language, or even a real country. That lack of specificity is precisely what allows the story to become so broad.
I gave it four stars, and I am glad I came across it through the POPSUGAR challenge because it is very different from the books I normally read. I have also seen that Shaun Tan has several other works, and after seeing what he can do with visual storytelling alone, I would definitely be interested in exploring more of them.
The Arrival has no readable words, but it has a great deal to say.
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