Tintin

 

This month my nineteen-year-old daughter talks about her first university assignments in early childhood development. Today, by chance, I came across this unfinished piece in the file dated June 2008: “Reading to your children is a rediscovery of the primary worlds of your own imagination. As if for the first time you plunge into the rivery world of Ratty and Mole, empathise (but only just) with Peter Rabbit sent to bed without supper, and engage in fisticuffs together with Bunyip Bluegum, Bill Barnacle, and Sam Sawnoff for possession of a self-reproducing pudding. I presumed that my five-year-old daughter would want to wait before setting off on the adventures of the Belgian journalist Tintin, but how presumptuous is that. The striking colours and fine drawing of these cartoon books, their ingenious dialogues and plot shifts, their quaintnesses and quirks, appealed immediately. We started with the least typical of all Tintin stories, ‘The Castafiore Emerald’. Usually, we get caught up in action, travel to foreign locations, get into scrapes, and solve questions of high espionage. This story takes place inside one house over a few days, its main interest being the theft of a jewel from the collection of Madame Bianca Castafiore, a self-absorbed opera diva who arrives on people’s doorsteps and chooses to stay. Suspects are numerous, above all the caravan of gypsies camped near the property at the invitation of the proprietor. Outsiders abound in Tintin, almost always turning out to be innocent of any wrongdoing. The truth lies closer to home. It’s apparent why children relate to the central character. Just as Lewis Carroll’s Alice walks through wonderlands of eccentric, dysfunctional and inexplicable adults, maintaining her authority through sheer common sense, so Tintin’s immediate circle of friends are oddballs that only accentuate Tintin’s natural good grace and rational responses to situations, whether elementary or alarming. Children need and seek the balanced viewpoint of a reliable character. And Tintin has a lot to cope with. Captain Haddock, for example. Hergé must have had a field day developing his second main character, an alcoholic seadog retired, but not from the grog. He is grumpy, cantankerous, prone to misjudgements. He has a short fuse and can explode at any moment at anyone with a barrage of his signature invective, “Billions of bilious blistering blue barnacles!” He is the irritable foil to the affable Tintin, just like the objectionable magic pudding. Haddock’s other occupations are reading books, smoking a pipe, and taking walks in the countryside. This man of leisure would live out his life undisturbed if it were not for his friend Tintin, whose high spirits and desire for sleuthing shakes Haddock out of his easy chair. Like Tintin’s dog Snowy, Haddock can have reservations about going on life-and-death tours of Africa or Asia, but the thrill of the new gets the better of him. This trio are the driving force of the narrative.” Elsewhere I summarise the plot as “based on an enigma rather than an adventure, as much ado about nothing is only resolved in the final frame on the last page.”