It didn’t make my Blog@ best-of list, but Shaun Tan’s The Arrival was nevertheless one of my favorite books of 2007, a remarkable debut that took the idea of immigration to a wild and fantastic fantasy world. It’s not to surprising, therefore, for me to say how much I appreciated this interview with Tan over at du9:
NV: Was this project a silent book from the start? What decided you on this choice?
ST: Speechlessness seemed quite obvious from early on, although the initial drafts had some caption-like text added to it, taking the form of a memoir, photo album, or postcards sent home. Once I dispensed with words altogether, however, the path was clear: the book had to be completely silent in order to work, both aesthetically and intellectually.
I found that this absence of language also slowed down the flow of the narrative, and that is something I needed because the panels are quite detailed, and there’s really not very many of them given the scope of the story. Words would hurry things along too much, and also possibly interfere with an open interpretation — I realise that my own “explanation” of what’s happening in the illustrations is not always the most interesting! Sometimes it’s better to let the reader imagine the captions or speech bubbles in their own personalised way.
One thing I’ve learnt as an illustrator over the years is that everyone sees a picture a little differently — especially young readers — and it’s best to facilitate this variation as much as possible, rather than try to correct it.
