Hometown. By Shaun Tan. Levine Querido. $24.99.
The acceptance of apparent weirdness as entirely normal lies at the heart of Shaun Tan’s strange and strangely moving, gorgeously odd books, and no more so than in his latest, Hometown. Tan’s art is immediately recognizable through its shading, coloration, and design of figures that, appearing to be almost but not quite the stuff of nightmares, turn out to be more normal, even sweet, than human-looking characters. The dreamscapes Tan creates call into question the disparity between appearance and behavior, the divergence of what things seem to be from what they are – and if that seems to put too much psychological freight on his lavishly weird creations, it is certainly possible (if less rewarding) simply to read his books as explorations of fantastic creatures in bizarre settings that have at most a momentary frisson of danger.
The key in Hometown is the sheer normality of the life of the teenage girl protagonist, who lives who-knows-where-and-why (“I’ve never lived anywhere else”) amid loving family members, supportive friends, and a plethora of everyday activities. All of which are, by the standards of everyday readers in our own world, monstrous. Tan carefully writes about the ordinariness of everything while showing scenes that are distinctly outré. Thus, “I go to work, do chores. Visit friends, hang out” shows the girl at the window or porthole of a very toothy conveyance creature that is exhaling steam or smoke from an organ atop what seems to be its head, and whose other passengers, both inside and on top, have the characteristics of snails, slugs, squids, and ancient denizens of Earth’s earliest ages. And “I even love going to school” shows the girl on her knees in the process of bowing down toward something-or-other, with her fellow students in a similar position as they raise their paws, claws, tentacles and other appendages (and in many cases not just two of them) to start their obeisances (if that is what they are).
There would be no story here – merely a display of the strange – unless something happened to disturb the girl’s comfortable existence in this mundane-to-her world, so of course something does. A thing of some sort appears from a hole in the sky and lands near the girl and her friends. It looks to readers of our own planet like a space-suited astronaut, and Tan spends some pages playing with perspective: the space thing is absolutely huge if and only if the girl and her friends are more or less Earth-human-sized. Or are the girl and other beings tiny and the space thing the size of an Earth human? That particular puzzle is eventually solved when the space thing, which has been “making a huge mess” by exploring here and there, is literally swallowed by “something big” that the girl knew “would come to set things right.” The toothed creature then disgorges the space thing, which in turn pops open, and out comes a smaller version of itself that now definitely appears to be a space-suited Earth human the same size as the girl protagonist. It tries to communicate, unsuccessfully of course, and the girl takes pity on it and brings it home to her family, which tastes and probes it courteously: “Nobody mentioned how weird it looked. We’re all super polite that way.”
The point of all the mundane writing is to contrast the girl’s perceptions of her family and hometown with the presumed perceptions of the space traveler: “Things were going pretty good,” according to the girl, but Tan’s picture shows the space thing recoiling in horror from the monstrosities all around. The thing eventually manages to communicate by using its equipment, explaining that it comes from a far, far distant place full of what the girl says it describes as “creatures that looked just like me.” And then, finally, it removes “its head and hand parts” and turns out to be a space-suited young man, clearly of the same species as the girl.
The rest of the book works out what happens after the boy tells her, “This is not your real home. Those are not your people.” And then he tries to “rescue” her and take her with him to space. Whether or not he succeeds, whether or not she wants him to succeed, is the point of the latter part of Hometown, in which the girl’s family reveals that she is indeed from elsewhere (how and why is never explained, nor is explanation needed) and leaves it up to her to decide whether to stay or go with the boy of her own kind. Tan, in his usual clever and faithful-to-dreams way, manages to let the girl and the boy have it both ways, but only after pulling readers again and again into a world where normalcy is defined not by physical appearance but by quotidian existence and, ultimately, by who loves you and whom you love. It is extremely hard to use mere words to describe what Tan does here and in his other books, because the whole point of his work is the art, in which grotesqueries of all sorts – some of them objectively quite scary-looking by Earth-normal standards – are simply going about their everyday lives, within which ordinary-looking characters (again by Earth standards) function without the slightest sense of the surreality pervading their reality.
The many wordless pages of Hometown are especially affecting, ranging from two-page spreads divided into 12 or 18 panels that collectively show elements of what the girl is doing and thinking to an amazing foldout, the equivalent of four book pages, showing most of the denizens of the girl’s hometown in all their indescribably weird glory and dark, rich color blends. This is ultimately an art book more than a storybook, a tale of a journey not quite to space nor exactly to one’s inmost being, but into and through a kind of thought experiment that allows, even requires readers (perhaps better designated as viewers or, even better, experiencers) to consider what home is, what home means, and when they can know that they really are where they really belong.
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