20 Years Later, the Long-Awaited Companion to a Classic Graphic Novel
As Shaun Tan reminds us with his stand-alone follow-up to “The Arrival,” some truths are so enormous, so beautiful, they can be told only through myth.
HOMETOWN, by Shaun Tan
G.K. Chesterton wrote that fairy tales “make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.” It is a simple truth, but easy to forget: The great myths give us eyes to see our own lives anew, by gilding the familiar with the fantastic.
It has been 20 years since Shaun Tan published his astonishing wordless graphic novel “The Arrival.” Equal parts atmospheric immigration allegory and surreal ride on a chiaroscuro carousel, the book instantly became a classic. Dauntless and strange, it shimmered like a new kind of myth — one whose primary language was not textual but visual.
When a modern mind reads the word “myth,” it might be tempted to substitute the word “falsehood.” Sadly, this is part of our hangover from the Enlightenment. It seems natural to us to assume that the best way to understand a rose is by putting it under a microscope — rather than by writing (or reading) a sonnet. But as Tan reminds us with his new opus, “Hometown,” some truths are so enormous, so beautiful, so elusive they can be told only through myth.
In “Hometown,” Tan doesn’t ask the pictures to do all the storytelling. With spare and clever prose, he poses some of the same transcultural questions he did in “The Arrival,” but from an inverted point of view.
The first-person story follows a girl who lives in, to our eyes, a bizarre and unusual land yet feels right at home. She is a human being, but the reader immediately sees that her world is not human in size, color, type or shape; its scenery is fantastical and monstrous. In the book’s most delightful passages, her down-to-earth words playfully contrast with what the reader sees alongside them. (“Little sister” and “big sister” are quite the understatement!)
We don’t know how the girl got there, but the paradise of her extraordinary found family is disrupted when a colossal visitor falls through a “big hole” that opens up in the sky. For a few pages, this gargantuan robotic astronaut is stepping on buildings and, it seems rather innocently, messing everything up. The residents are surprisingly understanding of the megalodon’s blunders: When the intruder is swallowed by a cross between a whale and a giant squid, they feel sorry for the “stupid sky thing.”
After the girl tells the “rudest joke” she knows in order to abort the whale-squid’s digestion, it becomes clear that the visitor is actually a humanoid-shaped spacecraft, from which a smaller humanoid astronaut steps out — comically, in the exact same shape as the spacecraft but at the scale of our young heroine.
The story turns when he takes off his helmet and she is struck by his physical similarity to her. Face to face with another human being, she begins to ask questions: Who is my actual family? What is the meaning of home? Like an alien satellite, “Hometown” orbits these questions over and over again. Each pass gives us a new perspective on the terrain below.
On one level, this book is a well-worn narrative of cross-cultural exchange.
But “Hometown” goes far beyond calling us to a confident pluralism. With monsters and moon men, it asks us to consider where our real identity comes from. Is it something we can’t choose, like what we look like, or does true kinship come from the community that made us? The lure of this tale is that it takes these universal questions and gives us a new, kaleidoscopic lens with which to view the answers.
Visually stunning as well, “Hometown” is a formal masterpiece, showcasing an artist at the height of his powers. Tan’s work is a deft push and pull of line and tone. Each image vibrates with glyphic drawing — yet at key moments those lines are submerged in lush washes of pure color. Imagine if the comic artist Moebius had been taught to paint by Caravaggio.
As an artist who has admired Tan for many decades, I have always wanted him to take a swing at treating the typographical spaces in his books with the same lavish world-building as he does the imagery. While he doesn’t do that here, his signature gestalt of pictures, story and sparse words still makes this book the highest form of art.
“Hometown” wraps the mundane things we all experience in a strange and wondrous veneer. In the foreground, it immerses its readers in mysterious objects, landscapes and creatures; yet, as with an exotic campfire, a familiar ache crackles in the background.
“Gravity keeps me here,” our protagonist declares as the story closes. “Or love, which is kind of the same thing.”
In an age when there are so many picture books helping young readers think about identity, “Hometown” brilliantly plants its feet on solid ground. This new myth reminds us that with the choice of love — a technology both ancient and ordinary — we can create belonging for ourselves.
posted by Ricky at 20:04
linkar para este post
