Never Leave a Red Sock on the Clothesline

A giant red rabbit has hauled itself over the wall of an ordinary backyard, ears folded flat, one enormous eye fixed on a small figure crouched near the water tank. The cause of all this trouble lies on the concrete below: a single red sock, dropped from the clothesline. Shaun Tan painted this for his 2013 picture book Rules of Summer, which strings together a series of odd commandments issued by an older brother to a younger one. There is no explanation of why the sock matters, and no explanation of the rabbit either. Children who read the book tend to accept both without blinking.

Tan is an Australian artist and author, best known for The Arrival and The Lost Thing, and his paintings often plant something impossible in the middle of very familiar suburban scenery. Here the setting does most of the work: cracked concrete, a tin shed with a terracotta roof, a rusting rainwater tank, all rendered in dusty ochres and greys that could belong to any hot afternoon in Perth. The surreal tradition of Giorgio de Chirico hovers behind it, with the long shadows and the strange stillness of empty architecture, though Tan trades Italian arcades for backyard clutter.

The book grew out of Tan's memories of childhood summers, when the rules siblings invent for each other feel completely binding and completely arbitrary at the same time. Consequences arrive out of nowhere, and nobody thinks to ask why. The rabbit is enormous and red and clearly furious, but the real subject is that small hunched figure who has broken a rule he probably did not know existed.