A Brush with The Burbs

Acclaimed for his illustrated books The Lost Thing (2000) and The Red Tree (2001), the Australian artist, illustrator and writer Shaun Tan took an enormous leap in recognition two years ago with the publication of The Arrival, his miraculous, wordless graphic novel, executed entirely in sepia-tinted drawings of breathtaking beauty and originality. It went on to bag a clutch of prestigious awards and became a New York Times best-selling children's book.

Tan is back now with Tales from Outer Suburbia, an illustrated volume of 15 stories or prose poems, mostly centered around the themes of journeying, faraway places and transformation, carving out between them rich territories of the strange, the allegorical and even the political.

In "The Nameless Holiday," a blind reindeer lands on the roofs of houses that are piled with one's most prized possessions — "objects [that] are so loved that their loss will be felt like the snapping of a cord to the heart" — and leaves with them in a dark inversion of the Christmas fable. "Alert but Not Alarmed" sees households issued with intercontinental ballistic missiles by the government. These sit in backyards for so long that people take to decorating them and using them as kennels or toolsheds (one illustration shows them as a bright garden of strange, leafless trees under a perfect blue sky). In "Eric," the cultural otherness of a foreign exchange student is given embodiment as a tiny two-dimensional creature with a leaf for a head.

The book's most moving story, "Distant Rain," is done entirely as a simulated collage, with drawings of little scraps of imagined private poetry — the poems that people "never let anyone else read." One night, they come together into a giant ball, which levitates over the city before breaking up and showering back down to earth as a new kind of precipitation. In the morning, everyone discovers a random fragment, containing "various faded words pressed into accidental verses." And to each reader they "whisper something different," touching lives with a "strange feeling of weightlessness."

Deploying pen and ink, pencil, woodcuts, crayons and oils, the drawings in the book are exalting, filling you with joy and revelation. But crucially, Tan can also write: his stories effortlessly rearrange the pattern of reality in prose that is evocative and supple. Seek this book out.