The Arrival by Shaun Tan

The Arrival  is a fiction picture book about the journey of a man who leaves his family to seek better prospects in a faraway unknown country. This book contains five hundred and forty seven illustrations each being hand drawn. It is a unique book as it contains absolutely no words, which is a first for Tan. The story deals with the topic of immigrants and the personal struggles and hardships they face throughout their travels and settling. This book is based on social, historical and political subjects and provides links to immigrants, asylum seekers and refugees. The story is inspired by Tan's own world as his father migrated to Australia from Malaysia in 1960.

This book follows most of the normal conventions of a narrative story plot.  The book moves in chronological order and is split into six chapters which each contain their own setting, actions and minor conflicts which all build to a major conflict/climax in the fifth chapter with a final resolution and conclusion in the sixth.The shape of each chapter is often based on some sort of minor conflict where the man in the story encounters strange, unknown foreign food, animals, languages (actions/minor conflicts) which lead to him meeting someone who helps him (resolution) and they share their tragic stories of why they escaped their countries and how they ended up happy where they are now (major conflict/resolution).

This book utilises imagery drawn in a third person narration style which is the most common form of images in most books. In order to show the passing of time Tan uses a chronological storyboard of a cloud moving over the sky or even a flower going through the stages of seasons. The images also follow conventions of written text to engage the reader.

Tan changes from present to past tense images to represent a change from external perspective to an internal one. For example when the main character meets someone new and the new character shares their past stories the images instantly change to tell the story of that character in past tense style, as if they were memory flash backs.  

This book is an absolute one of a kind and should be read by all. Especially those wanting to discover a whole new approach to story telling through images. It would be a useful book to use in Art classes as it not only uses amazing illustration techniques that look like art but also considers many important aspects of storyboard/comic strip writing.