#4: "Memorial" illustrated by Shaun Tan

[sweet-adelheid.livejournal.com]

Memorial by Gary Crew, illustrations by Shaun Tan.

As this review is primarily for 50books_poc, it's going to focus on the illustrations by Shaun Tan. Having said that, the story (comments by three generations of a family on the importance of the Moreton Bay Fig that forms part of the town's war memorial, now threatened by 'progress') is stunning, and raises multiple issues/discussion points that my small group at the Hebrew Scriptures intensive I did recently had a great deal of fun discussing.

The illustrations, though - oh, the illustrations. Shaun Tan, what can you say? In this book he has a number of full-page, wordless spreads, and he makes the most of each of them. The most startling and the one that makes the most impression (from my perspective) is the one that immediately follows the clearest statement of "You can't fight City Hall". To the far right of the spread is the memorial statue, a soldier standing over his rifle, as they do at an ANZAC Day service at each corner of any War Memorial in the country. Across the rest of the page drift leaves. You can imagine the leaves drifting across in a winter wind, or more ominously, flying across the statue from where the chainsaws have attacked the Fig tree.

Although the book calls (as you can probably tell) on some incredibly Australian images of memorialisation and the recollection of war (the WWI spread may be more generally iconic, however), I think it would have a fairly universal appeal, at least within the Commonwealth and ex-Commonwealth/British Empire nations. (That said, Australia has a particular relationship with each of the three wars mentioned (the two World Wars, and the Vietnam War) that would not necessarily resonate in the same way in the USA, for example.)

In any event, the illustrations don't just complement the text, they extend it. They bring the issues of progress, environment, memorialisation and war into far more stark relief than the words can do alone. Like all of Tan's work, it is utterly awesome, and so layered and complex that every reading will reveal something further. Shaun Tan is a national treasure, and the sooner Australia in general realises this, the better.

Tags: w-a:crew.gary illus:tan.shaun