Gary K. Wolfe Reviews Tales from the Inner City by Shaun Tan

Tales from the Inner City, Shaun Tan (Arthur A. Levine Books 978-1-338-29840-6, $24.99, 224pp, hc) October 2018.

Shaun Tan’s always remarkable work, from his Oscar-winning short The Lost Thing to his wordless fable of immigration The Arrival, often returns to themes of alienation and belonging, and in Tales from the Inner City he takes on very nearly the whole of nature vs. civilization, or at least the ongo­ing negotiations between the animal world and the infrastructures, schedules, and bureaucracies we’ve tried to impose on it. Bears decide to mount a class-action suit against humanity, crocodiles take over the 87th floor of a high-rise, giant snails make love on highway overpasses, the members of a corporate board all suddenly turn into frogs, lungfish show up everywhere after a hurricane and gradually take on human features and eventually develop a miniature society that seems superior to our own. Sometimes Tan’s spare and graceful poems and prose sketches carry the weight of his narratives, as in a tale in which a family’s missing cat turns out to be everyone’s missing cat; sometimes the burden rests largely with the characteristically muted and luminous paintings, as in a poem about dogs and their humans which gives rise to no fewer than 13 paintings, most of them double-page spreads using the same angular design elements to suggest varieties of alienation and cooperation. On occasion, a painting implies the whole story, as in a kind of prologue image of deer gazing out from a forest through a window that overlooks a city skyline.

None of the individual stories or sketches are given titles, and the rather beguiling table of con­tents consists only of silhouettes of the birds and animals that are the subjects of the various pieces. Sometimes these pieces are little more than dream­like visions – countless butterflies appearing out of nowhere and inundating the city, an orca removed from the sea and placed in the sky – and sometimes Tan constructs a full-fledged short story, such as the tale about a spectacularly brilliant prodigy who survives the celebrity of being a boy genius to work in menial jobs, where he dreams about hippos. I take Tan’s overall title to refer not to the “inner city” of sociologists and economists, but rather to the hidden city in which nature survives in unexpected ways. It would be far too reductive, though, to reduce Tan’s endlessly inventive visions to environmental cautionary tales, although a few are quite explicitly that – such as a brief poem about motorists cheer­ing when a rhino clogging freeway traffic is shot and removed – but “Nobody knew it was the last rhino.” For the most part, though, Tan’s words and pictures develop a haunting synergy that is as much about mystery as about advocacy. As the narrator of the lungfish tale observes – as the lungfish begin to develop human faces – “explanation is a luxury we can’t afford these days, and reality doesn’t care for it, being far too busy following its own unknowable course.” Tales from the Inner City is a gorgeous charting of that course.

This review and more like it in the December 2018 issue of Locus.

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