Tales from the Inner City by Shaun Tan (review)

You know from the very first glance, from the very first touch, that a book created by Shaun Tan, such as Tales from the Inner City, is going to disturb you. It is going to send you spiraling from your so-called real world into a world in which you will be speechless and wordless because his marvelously peculiar drawings and paintings are so provocative and alienating. You feel as though you have been transported to Kafka’s novella Metamorphosis (1915), and, like Gregor Samsa, you awake and are incapable of knowing what has transpired and caused the world to turn upside down. The more you try to be rational, the more the world around you appears to be weird and irrational.

This time, in contrast to his remarkable wordless masterpiece, The Arrival (2006), there are words—poems, stories, and commentaries—that may assist you in explaining the inexplicable of the images of an inner city. You will never fully understanding this inner city, but you will sense that they reflect the barren facades of a peopled environment, where humans and animals engage in absurd struggles. Everyone is estranged from everyone. Unlike The Arrival and his other works, this book depicts humans and animals desperate for compassion and survival.

Twenty-five illustrated narratives and poems are inserted or encased in Tales from the Inner City. The cover depicts a boy named Pim who goes fishing in the sky and catches a gigantic moonfish that he proudly exhibits to onlookers with TV antennas sprouting in the background. The back of the book portrays the enormous head of the “lost” cat called Tugboat with a girl perched between his ears as they swim outward into a turbulent sea. The front inside of the book consists of black and orange arrows on a plastered street wall, and if you follow the arrows and turn to the inside end of the book, the arrows turn into a huge black-and-orange tiger staring at you on a lonesome street. The title page is a misty blue-gray painting of an indistinguishable city that blends into the sky, and, once you turn the title page, you are stunned by a full-bleed two-page spread that reveals two deer, at the edge of a forest amidst trees and wood-covered grass, looking out through a glass window of a skyscraper and gazing at the dim blue-gray skyscrapers of a city.

Following a second title page, we read a short epigraph written by Alice Walker: “The animals of the world exist for their own reasons.” And, in fact, they are pictured as invasive creatures, but not malicious, who constitute our inner cities for their own reasons. Actually, we are the invaders who have devastated their lands and destroyed their environment. Consequently, the animals have no place to go and must deal with humans and provoke humans to deal with them. This is quite apparent in the very first story in which crocodiles inhabit and live on the eighty-seventh floor of a skyscraper. At the end of the first-person narrative, we learn this:

Nobody even remembers that this whole city was built on a swamp. The crocodiles, well, they’ve been living in this very spot for a million years and I’ll bet they’ll still be here long after the traffic has ground itself back into mud and we hairless apes conclude our final meeting, declare bankruptcy and move on, as hairless apes will do. In the cool brain of a crocodile the city is just a waiting room: the biggest of all waiting rooms, rising up through an age with which they have no account, no appointment, and to which they owe no attention.

(3)

From this point on, Tan’s book is about unusual incidents involving the encounters of animals and humans. It is not a didactic animal rights plea. Rather, it is a pictorial account of our engagements with creatures that occupy our minds and imaginations: butterflies that arrive at...