KEY POINTS:
Shaun Tan is a friendly, low-key Australian. He was born there 32 years ago to a Malaysian father and Australian mother, and his latest book, the much-lauded The Arrival, was to a small degree motivated by his father's uprooting from his native country. "My father didn't talk a great deal about his experiences, but I've always been conscious of immigration, and I researched immigrant stories while I was doing the book, and his was one of them'.
The Arrival took five arduous years to produce. "Initially, it was only going to be the average picture book length, but I kept on adding just another 16 pages. Luckily, because my previous books had been commercial successes, the publishers became committed to this project. I never meant it to be 128 pages long, and if I had known that in the beginning, it would have saved a lot of redrafting.'
It was in The Arrival that Tan first started playing with the idea of a wordless book. "In the early version, there were a few words, but I got rid of them. Generally speaking, if I feel a story can survive without words, I won't use them. It takes some of the magic away if you add captions. People are always going to look at words and pay more attention to them than the actual images.'
Using sepia and story-boarding techniques, The Arrival is like looking at a fascinating old photo album.
Tan is a superb painter and, not surprisingly, prefers to call himself an artist rather than an illustrator. So how did this fine arts honour graduate get into producing picture books? "It was through my association with Gary Crewe, a renowned horror children's writer. He invited me to illustrate a book he had in mind called The Viewer. In keeping with his earlier works, it depicts scenes of destruction, violence and the collapse of civilisations through time.'
The themes of bleakness and hopelessness also imbue his second book, The Rabbits, with text by another Australian literary luminary, John Marsden. These rabbits bear no resemblance to their anthropomorphic relations in Beatrix Potter's books; these creatures are invaders, colonisers and outright destructive. Tan says the book conveys "an overall sense of bewilderment and anxiety'. So when it won Picture Book of the Year from the Children's Book Council, the floodgates of controversy opened. Not everyone was convinced that such a dystopic view of the world was suitable children's reading material.
However, a vindicated Tan says: "In spite of this, or because of it, the book went on to win numerous awards in Australia, the US and UK.' Unavailable for several years, it has just been reprinted and should be released in New Zealand soon.
Tan again collaborated with Gary Crewe in his next book, Memorial (Lothian $32.99). It is a surprisingly gentle and contemplative story about the instability but ultimate power of memory. A young boy tells the story of his great-grandfather who is remembering the day he came back from war. A tree is planted as a memorial to all the soldiers who lost their lives. Now, decades later, the tree's roots are disturbing another memorial, a statue of an unknown soldier. The boy is distraught that this tree is going to be cut down, but his great-grandfather reminds him that memories are more lasting than anything else.
Tan laughed when I asked him whether he was a pessimist. "Someone once told me that my work was very negative, and that was because I was young, which I found really presumptuous, but he's sort of right.'
His latest two books, The Red Tree and The Arrival are the most optimistic of his works, but he openly admits that The Lost Thing, the first book he wrote as well as illustrated, is definitely pessimistic. In it, a nerdy lad on the look-out for bottle tops for his collection finds a strange, red creature wandering the streets. In a deadpan manner, the young man takes us on a journey through an indifferent city to find out where this thing belongs. Nobody is particularly interested in his quest until "eventually we found what seemed to be the right place, in a dark little gap off some anonymous little street'. He leaves his thing inside an enormous room inhabited by other surreal-looking things.
Tan has always been interested in displacement, which he agrees is not usual children's book fare. So are his books really for children? "Obviously not young children. I see them as picture books for older readers, even adults, as they deal with relatively complex visual styles and themes, including colonial imperialism, social apathy, the nature of memory and depression.'
I wondered if Tan had ever considered being a fulltime artist. "If I had my way, I'd probably spend more than half my time painting, but I also find that quite exhausting, because it's pretty intense, painting big canvases to try to create something that's surprising, and I do try to impress myself. It's pretty hard. It gets harder and harder, although I tend to treat every project as if it's my first.'
Tan is visiting New Zealand this week as part of the Storylines festival, www.storyline.org.nz
