Celebrating Shaun Tan

by

Gillian Polack

Today I’m celebrating. Shaun Tan has just won a shared Academy Award for his animation, The Lost Thing (following up with an Australian Ditmar Award), and the Astrid Lindgren Award for his work in children’s literature. This is a good moment. Not as good as the moment when I first discovered his work, or the moment when I met him and discovered that I could be shy of someone with whom I have good friends in common and who is gentle and affable and very, very Australian. Shaun Tan is that rare thing—a genuine genius. Enough to drive anyone to shyness.

I want to celebrate, however, and to share his brilliance with you. I want to tell you how I first encountered The Arrival and a bit about the book. I want to talk about Tales of Lost Suburbia and explain why my computer wallpaper is a picture from that book. Mostly, I want to celebrate.

Some countries are urban: Australia is mostly suburban. We’re a nation of immigrants, like the US only . . . not. Until recently, we were in the shadow of the US and of Britain. We rather suspected we’d never amount to anything much. We found our pleasures in the small things of life and in sport. We were educated, but didn’t tell anyone. We liked our art and our music and our literature, but were cautious about explaining this to the world. We hid behind the myth of the rugged land and the impassable country. Or maybe we live on the edges of that myth. This year, the myth has engulfed us with its reality: we’ve had cyclone and flood and our best friend and next door neighbour has had appalling earthquakes and another close friend and neighbour has had the worst disaster in their history. Despite all this, we still remain mostly suburban in outlook. Even our small towns are suburban in outlook.

Suburban has consequences. For instance, Australians don’t use words like ‘genius’ with any ease, especially in the Arts. We only admitted that Patrick White might be one after he won the Nobel Prize, and then we added that he was probably English, really. Joan Sutherland had to fight like fury to receive even half the recognition she deserved. Tan is one. Bona fide. Genius. And I can say it without stammering or blushing or trying to find a way of making it look small.

The man himself is modest. Just a regular nice guy with a Western Australian accent. Broader than my clipped Melbourne speech, and flatter to the ear. Very gentle with fans and friends of friends and anyone else who encounters him. This modest bloke has managed to capture Australia in his work in a way that shows who we are. Instead of making us look larger or smaller or stranger, we look like ourselves, with all the loneliness and all the whimsy and all the hurt and all the joy that mark us.

I only knew of him as an artist before The Arrival came out. He’s one of a whole bunch of Australian artists who move in the speculative fiction world (it’s a very small world, which is how I know him and them): Nick Stathopoulos, Marilyn Pride, Lewis Morley, Bob Eggleton, DM Cornish, Les Petersen, Shane Parker, Kathleen Jennings, Andrew McKiernan and more. We’re very rich in good artists.

Then one year, I was a judge for the Young Adult section of the Aurealis Awards. Lothian Books had nominated The Arrival for the award, but the copies hadn’t appeared. A judge who had already seen it said urgently “We can’t leave this book out.” Our chair got in touch with Lothian and said “You nominated it—are you going to send copies?” Apparently, it had sold instantly when it hit shops and they had run out of copies. Somehow, they found enough for us and we looked at it. It was too late to consider it for other categories, otherwise it might have found a better fit. It had been nominated for Young Adult, however, and so our panel was able to consider it.

The normal pattern (in my experience) for Aurealis judging panels is to be conservative and choose outstanding works that exemplify genre expectations. We acted in quite the opposite way in 2006, just that once, and Tan won the Young Adult Short Story category (even though his was a book and had no words) and then the final Golden Aurealis for best short story overall. That initial judgement received a lot of criticism. Ben Peek was my favourite. He said “I tried taking the drugs that Bellis, Phelps, and Polack must have taken to reach this decision.” He followed that with a long description of the factors he would have taken into consideration. We had taken them all into consideration, but still came to the outcome he so disliked. It wasn’t easy. There were some remarkable short stories that year, but Tan’s work dwarfed everything. What we should classify it was only one of the issues. The biggest of all was that it could not be allowed to pass without being honoured.

What the awards needed was a special category for graphic novels. Tan’s win made it imperative that there be one, and since 2008 graphic novels have had their own category.

The Arrival has no words. Or rather, the only words are the title.

It’s the story of a migrant. There’s a whole page of cloud pictures, as the migrant looks at the sky on the boat coming over. There are flowers and seasons and strange animals and even stranger machines. Anyone who has been alone in a distant land will see the fantasy elements and say “This is how it really is.” That’s Tan’s genius—he allows us to see beyond the surface and to the reality.

A few of the pictures are on his website, but the book as a whole is far more than the sum of its parts. I’m guilty of making friends read it and of sitting and watching their faces as they do. They each bring a very personal reaction to the volume, lingering over some pages, laughing over others. Once there were tears. “This was me when I came here,” that friend said. Every time I read it, it tells me different things. Each time I watch my friends’ faces, they bring different reactions.

Tales from Outer Suburbia is at the opposite end of the emotional spectrum from The Arrival. Each tale has a single page and a single illustration. They're micro-stories or descriptions or statements. They remind me a bit of James Thurber and a bit of Joan Aiken. The stories stand alone and the pictures stand alone, but together, they dissolve into a special magic. Some of the illustrations are here and, as I said, one of the pictures from my book is wallpaper for my computer. The US publisher was celebrating their artists and made covers and internal art available for a short time.

What my computer shows me when I’m not working is a street, dry and Australian-summer-yellow. A young man is watering his nature strip. A young woman is sitting on a boat rowing. The boat is moving gently down the middle of the road, its personal cloud calmly watering her plants in their pots.

If we had a lost suburbia, it would contain stories like these: the tales we cannot see because we haven’t found out where to look or how to look. Lost suburbia is there in Tan’s Outer Suburbia. Give us a street and we'll turn it suburban. Then add Tan's special view and Australia becomes somewhere beautiful and whimsical and maybe a little insecure.

Books mentioned in this column:
The Arrival by Shaun Tan (Arthur A. Levine Books, 2007)
Tales from Outer Suburbia by Shaun Tan (Arthur A. Levine Books, 2009)  

Gillian Polack is based in Canberra, Australia. She is mainly a writer, editor and educator. Her most recent print publications are a novel (Life through Cellophane, Eneit Press, 2009), an anthology (Masques, CSfG Publishing, 2009, co-edited with Scott Hopkins), two short stories and a slew of articles. Her newest anthology is Baggage, published by Eneit Press (2010).One of her short stories won a Victorian Ministry of the Arts award a long time ago, and three have (more recently) been listed as recommended reading in international lists of world's best fantasy and science fiction short stories. She received a Macquarie Bank Fellowship and a Blue Mountains Fellowship to work on novels at Varuna, an Australian writers' residence in the Blue Mountains. Gillian has a doctorate in Medieval history from the University of Sydney. She researches food history and also the Middle Ages, pulls the writing of others to pieces, is fascinated by almost everything, cooks and etc. Currently she explains 'etc' as including Arthuriana, emotional cruelty to ants, and learning how not to be ill. She is the proud owner of some very pretty fans, a disarticulated skull named Perceval, and 6,000 books. Contact Gillian.