Strange, surreal, and quirky are all words that could describe Shaun Tan’s oeuvre. His groundbreaking graphic novel The Arrival (2007)—named a Kirkus Best Book of the 21^st Century—pairs sepia-toned imagery that suggests immigrants arriving at Ellis Island with sweeping alien landscapes for an exploration of the refugee experience. His picture book Cicada (2019) centers on an insect office worker bullied by colleagues.

Tan agrees that his work is strange and surreal, though he takes issue with quirky. “It sounds a little bit like frivolous, and I’m really not trying to be frivolous,” he tells Kirkus via Zoom from his home in Melbourne. “I do frivolous work in my sketchbooks,” he says, but his published work is a serious, thought-provoking investigation of real life.

A laser-sharp precision is characteristic of Tan’s artistic sensibilities—a trait he believes he inherited from his father, an architect. “He was always a ‘measure three times, cut once’ sort of guy,” says Tan, who’s equally exacting. “I have to do five sketches of everything. So by the time I do a painting, I really know everything about it.”

Nowhere is that attention to detail more evident than in his new middle-grade graphic novel, Hometown (Levine Querido, Sept. 1), which centers on a young girl leading what she believes to be a rather monotonous life. In direct contrast to her matter-of-fact narration about family and daily activities, Tan’s intricate paintings depict a surreal world; think Hieronymus Bosch compositions populated by creatures straight out of H.P. Lovecraft or H.G. Wells. “I love visiting Grandma” is paired with an image of the girl (the sole human in her world) extending a hand to an amoebalike animal floating in the air; the protagonist’s “three crazy brothers” are a trio of toothy, wide-eyed wolves. She finds nothing unusual about her situation until an explorer—another human—shows up, passes judgment on what he believes to be a horrifying world where she doesn’t belong, and urges her to leave with him.

There’s an almost cinematic feel to Hometown, and, indeed, Tan has helped to adapt two of his works to the screen—the film version of The Lost Thing won an Academy Award for Best Short Film in 2011—and consulted on animated movies such as Wall-E. “I was definitely thinking about it almost as a stop-motion animated film,” he says. “There’s a lot of attention to lighting; it’s almost stage lighting...and I’ve learned a lot from working with animators, both how to create an image, but also how to structure your workflow.”

As he does in most of his work, Tan avoids speech bubbles; his text appears under and occasionally next to the book’s panels. Tan believes that text and art “are best kept separate to the extent that if you removed the words…it should still read pretty well.” He adds, “That is the fascinating thing about illustrated stories for me, that constant electric charge that comes from [separating] pictures and images. They’re just buzzing against each other…and that’s the reader trying to make sense of what they’re seeing.”

Educators have told him they’ve read his picture book The Lost Thing (2005) aloud to students without showing them the images until the end; children often assume that the titular thing is a dog, but it’s revealed to be an enormous tentacled metallic creature. “Kids are delighted when they see that,” he says. They’re also surprised by the setting, “a wasteland of gigantic buildings and machines that are crushing all the humanity out of the landscape.” Tan wants to stir his readers, to make them question their assumptions—especially now, given the global movement toward authoritarianism. Things are “sometimes dangerously absurd but become increasingly normalized, and I think art and literature are really about trying to wake us up: Nothing is normal. Don’t be fooled by this rhetoric.”

Voicelessness, troubled communication, and marginalization are all themes that crop up frequently in his work, perhaps the result of being the child of an immigrant; Tan’s father, who is of Chinese descent, relocated from Malaysia to Australia. “English is his second language, and I don’t speak his first language, which is Chinese. I was quite used to growing up in a household where you have to think a bit more about communication.” Well aware of Australia’s history of settler colonialism, Tan has also long been drawn to the topic of first contact between people from different cultures. He drew inspiration from the satirical musical The Book of Mormon, which follows missionaries attempting to convert inhabitants of a Ugandan village.

“It made me laugh, but it also made me think,” he says. “What is it like for two groups with very different expectations and objectives when they come together? I could see it from the point of view of the missionary. You’re going to a place and you’re seeing these people that, from [your] point of view, need to be rescued.” When Indigenous peoples were brought to Europe, Tan points out, they were similarly alarmed: “They [found] various things pretty disgusting and horrifying.” Likewise, in Hometown, the human visitor is horrified when he watches the girl and her family eat dinner; he recoils as they devour the entrails of a creature they’ve hunted and apparently disemboweled. “It’s maybe the only time I’ve ever drawn a vomiting scene,” he says.

Hometown marks another first—the first time Tan has written a book centered on an adolescent. His own hometown, Perth in Western Australia, was a sprawling suburban landscape that he—not unlike the book’s protagonist— found uninspiring. In his 20s, he reevaluated that opinion as he studied artists like Van Gogh, who often depicted ordinary places and objects. Sketching the streets around his parents’ house, Tan realized, “Maybe art isn’t about exotic subjects, and real science fiction isn’t about exotic interplanetary worlds. It’s about what’s right in front of you.” Perth, he says, was “all the more fascinating for not being beautiful, being this uneasy mix of misshapen suburban housing and these very old ancient trees left over from bush clearing.”

Tan wants to rouse readers into seeing the quotidian with fresh eyes. “There’s weird stuff happening around us the moment we step out our front door,” he says. The tram he often walks by resembles “giant mechanical caterpillars crawling up and down the street, full of people that go in and out of its body. If you were an anthropologist from another planet...you would be gobsmacked.”

Though Tan’s books have long been recognized for their brilliance—he’s received the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, several Locus Awards, and a Hugo Award—he says, with characteristic self-deprecation, “I can easily imagine all of this work falling into absolute obscurity in 100 years, but I hope that it doesn’t.” While working, he tries to avoid speculating about tangible successes. “I’m just trying to get things as right as I can for myself, and I trust that they will resonate with other people, if the feeling is so precisely tuned to that very delicate thing called truth,” he says. “It’s rare, and it takes a lot of work to boil things down to those little tiny flecks of gold in the bottom of the pan.”

“That’s been the real miracle of my art-making career,” he adds, “the realization that if…something feels absolutely right to you, it [will feel] absolutely right to other people.” 

Mahnaz Dar is a young readers’ editor.