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When he came up with the idea for The Red Tree, Shaun Tan thought it would be interesting to create a book with no storyline, no main character and no narrative. He imagined a series of visuals with a vague arc from beginning to end, the idea being you could open the book at any page and each one could tell a story in itself.
“It doesn’t sound like a lot of fun in an acquisitions meeting,” the author and illustrator quips, adding it was initially knocked back but his editor encouraged him to work on the concept.
This month marks the 25th anniversary of what would become Tan’s landmark book: it went on to become a bestseller, translated into a number of languages.
The author of more than a dozen books, an Oscar winner for the animated short film based on his book The Lost Thing and, more recently, TV maker, for Tales of Outer Suburbia on the ABC, Tan won the State Library of Victoria’s Dromkeen Medal for services to children’s literature in 2011 and, that same year, Sweden’s Astrid Lindgren prize, the world’s richest children’s literature award.
The book’s anniversary has reminded him “of what I was thinking when I was doing the book in the first place”.
At 26, Tan had experienced bouts of depression, which he describes as “almost a delusional state where the possibility of hope does not exist”.
“That is the biggest problem, not the bad feeling so much but the idea that there is no hope.”
While the images in The Red Tree are bleak, a recurring motif in each suggests scope for change. “In every illustration there is this little red leaf, but the protagonist, the nameless girl in every picture, can’t see it. She’s walking away from it, or it’s lying in the gutter, or it’s blowing in the wind behind her,” Tan says.
“It’s always there, waiting, and then at the end, of course, it explodes into this tree, just to sort of remind her, ‘well, I was always there but you just couldn’t see me’. And the most interesting thing about the leaf is [it’s] very tiny, so it’s hard to see.”
The Brunswick-based, Perth-born author has seen images from almost every page of the book as a tattoo over the years, including – writ large on someone’s back – the main character drawing herself on a wall, which is a play on the Magritte image of a man looking at the back of his head in a mirror.
“A lot of people have a tattoo of a simple red leaf, which I get because it’s almost like, well, it’s there on me,” he says, adding it’s often inked on a part of the body you can’t see, like the back of the knee.
The book also been adopted by psychologists and medical practitioners as a way to get people to talk using images. Tan never envisaged his work as a resource in the treatment of mental health, let alone being invited to speak at a psychiatry convention. He has received many letters of thanks over the years, from people dealing with cancer and other illnesses, and from people helping families of people with terminal diagnoses and, more recently, from the survivors of suicide.
To mark The Red Tree’s anniversary, original oil paintings from the book will be exhibited at Beinart Gallery in Brunswick in Melbourne’s inner north, in a show of the same name. Also featured at Tan’s long-term gallery will be new works and sketches, plus artist commentary. Hachette will reprint the book in October with a new introduction by the author.
Many of the images featured in the book look like they could have been created today. When you make art, Tan says, it creates “a little fossilised emotional moment”.
“When you do this sort of painting and you just focus on the more universal feeling, it becomes quite prescient, just by accident. There’s this page that says the world is a deaf machine, and it’s a very AI-looking image.”
Published just weeks before September 11, 2001, the book also includes an image with planes circling high-rise buildings.
Children read the book more positively than adults, according to Tan, who says they tend to study the pictures as independent offerings, as opposed to adults who look for an overarching meaning.
Tan’s strange and wondrous art is his way of making sense of the world. To his mind it’s inherently optimistic. “It’s almost like that is the basic ideology of art-making is trying. You wouldn’t really do it if you didn’t think the world would be a slightly better place for having done it. It’s a constructive act, it’s not destructive,” he says, even if it’s dark or depressing.
Looking back, he recalls being determined that The Red Tree would be honest and reflect his experience. “I always felt it was a little bit more complex than having a happy ending because if you go back to the beginning, it’s almost a circular book. It admits that this tree is not going to last. There’s a clock on the title page, which suggests this is a cycle, so it’s not permanent – the state of this revelation at the end will not be permanent. And then if you go back to the beginning, it’s exactly the same bedroom and there are dead leaves falling. So there’s a sense that bad things will happen again and I like that it wasn’t painting an unrealistic picture. I felt that that hopeful, happy ending was realistic because that’s how it feels when it ends or something changes in a positive way,” he says.
“At the end of the day, you realise that you have to be hopeful, you almost don’t have a choice. You’ve got to make an effort as well, it’s not something that you can just expect to land in your lap. You have to really try hard.”
