The Arrival

I can be awfully thick sometimes. Case in point:

The Arrival, by Shaun Tan

When the oh-so-fabulous Roz from Scholastic handed me a sample of The Arrival, I didn't get it. At all. I knew it was supposed to be about an immigrant, but long about page 10 I started thinking, "What the...? Did this dude emigrate to Venus or what?" Just so you won't think I'm completely nuts, let me point out that there are no words in this book. It's a graphic novel, and before long the landscape starts looking almost like it was pumped out of an intergalactic soft-serve machine. Then these funky little creatures and bizarre vegetables showed up, and I could literally feel the I-don't-get-it varnish hardening over my brains. But I dutifully turned every page so as to look thoughtful and appreciative -- in short, like I knew what I was doing -- and ordered one copy.

Well, The Arrival arrived for real yesterday, and I sat down to have a good long look, determined to really blankety-blanking get it this time. You know what? I did.

Boy, did I get it this time around, and I felt so smart, too! I almost hestitate to explain The Arrival so you can discover it for yourself, but that would mean I'd have to stop talking about it, and I'm not at all willing to quit just yet. So -- let me steal a quote from Brian Selznick's blurb to help de-mystify things: "I loved how it slowly dawned on me that this bizarre world was how any immigrant might see the new place they go...everything is different and scary and magical." Oh! It's not that our hero is somehow seeing everything wrong, it's that this new world is in fact THAT different from what he (and we) are accustomed to. It is indeed an alien world, and not in the outer space sense of the word.

As our pal the immigrant adjusts to his new surroundings, things start to look less odd. Now that's not because the strange pictures suddenly morph into familiar objects -- the friendly doglike critter on the cover that looks like a long tailed lemon with legs will never turn into a golden retriever. Instead, like the immigrant himself, you simply become used to the new world and how it works. As it turns out, this is a country where pets can look like winged slugs, and fruit might be shaped like an overgrown tadpole, and the more time you spend there, the less kooky it all seems. It helps that the people are all very friendly and helpful, too.

Why no words, you ask? Well, you don't need them, for one thing. The artwork makes it quite clear how our immigrant feels and what he's thinking. Also, this guy is coping with a world in which not only the language but the alphabet itself is foreign, so it's only fair and fitting that the reader has the same experience -- no extra clues to help us puzzle our way along. That nonsensical alphabet is actually what helped me finally understand how the whole book works -- namely that we're in the same boat (har har) with the immigrant himself as he explores and adapts to his new home.

So now I'm completely taken with this book. I'd buy the shop's first copy right off the shelf, but then I wouldn't be able to show it to hapless people who wander in looking for something to read....