The Arrival is a book that uses fully realized pencil drawings—and no words—to convey the feelings associated with the migrant experience. There are numerous common problems that all migrants face, regardless of nationality and destination: grappling with language difficulties, home-sickness, poverty, a loss of social status and recognisable qualifications, not to mention loneliness and separation from family.
Author Shaun Tan borrows the ‘language’ of old pictorial archives and family photo albums, which have both a documentary clarity and an enigmatic, sepia-toned silence, to tell a story about a man who leaves his family and home to find a new life in an unseen country, where even the most basic details of ordinary life are strange, confronting or confusing—not to mention beyond the grasp of language.
The author says:
Words are wonderfully convenient conveyors of ideas. In their absence, even describing the simplest of actions, like someone packing a suitcase, buying a ticket, cooking a meal or asking for work threatened to become a very complicated, laborious and potentially slippery exercise in drawing. I had to find a way of carrying this kind of narrative that was practical, clear and visually economical.Unwittingly, I had found myself working on a graphic novel rather than a picture book. There is not a great difference between the two, but in a graphic novel there is perhaps far more emphasis on continuity between multiple frames, actually closer in many ways to film-making than book illustration.
Check out some of the resulting illustrations here. The digital version of these is so moving that I can't wait to hold the actual book in my hands.
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