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Tom McCarthy, Tintin and the Secret of Literature (London: Granta, 2006). 211 pp. ISBN: 978-1-86207-831-9 (hb, £14.99) Tom McCarthy's Tintin and the Secret of Literature is likely to be devoured by Tintinologists the world over who are rabid for any new work related to the dauntless (and ageless) journalist/adventurer with the signature quiff and indelible plus-fours. Readers anticipating a work imbued with the archival richness of Michael Farr's Tintin: The Complete Companion4 or the biographical insights of Harry Thompson's criminally out-of-print Tintin: Herge and his Creation,5 however, might be more than a little surprised with what they find themselves ingesting. This is not to say that Tintin and the Secret of Literature is unpalatable fare. McCarthy is uninterested in sharing the retrospective air that pervades these other well-known books; instead, he seeks to explain the continued relevance and popularity of the Tintin series by fixing it - to the hilt - in literary theory and philosophical discourse. The likes of Derrida, Barthes, de Man, and Sartre inform McCarthy's interactions with Tintin, resulting in readings that are always entertaining, and frequently startling. McCarthy straps on his 'literary goggles' (4) early in his study and asks readers to share a modified perception of Tintin: what might happen, McCarthy wonders, if Tintin were treated and studied as literature? If 'we bring the same critical apparatus to bear as we would when analysing Flaubert, James or Conrad' (10), how might our understanding of Tintin be enhanced? The short answer, which the remainder of the book seeks to flesh out, is that 'wrapped up in a simple medium for children is a mastery of plot and symbol, theme and sub-text far superior to that displayed by most real novelists' (32). To his credit, McCarthy realises that his starting point involves a healthy dose of question-begging, and he admits that: 'To confuse comics with literature would be a mistake' (32). While this admission seemingly subverts McCarthy's efforts, he embraces the marginal position of comics within literary studies, claiming it as the source of his book's interpretive strength: it is because Herge's canon 'occupies a space below the radar of literature proper' (32) that it can potentially interact with theories of literature from unexpected directions. The book's first chapter, 'R/G', sets the tone for what follows. The chapter's title involves a doubled gesture (which is fitting, since McCarthy identifies a persistent fascination with doubling in Herge's work): it serves to recognise both Herge's name - the French pronunciation of Georges Remi's reversed initials, an authorial exercise in 'erasure' (30) that McCarthy claims trickles down to pervade Tintin at a fundamental level - and Barthes's S/Z, a work that deeply informs McCarthy's understanding of the Tintin books. McCarthy argues that Barthes's belief that 'narrative is born from a contract [...] opens up a seam that runs right to the heart of Herge's work' (12, 13). McCarthy puts his encyclopaedic familiarity with this work on full display, providing numerous examples in support of his claim that: 'In the Tintin books, narratives are bought and sold, stolen and substituted, or twisted out of shape until, turned inside out or back to front, they mutate into other narratives' (15). McCarthy's interest in subverted narratives fuels not just this opening chapter, but his entire study. After establishing the importance of competing narratives and acts of reading in Tintin - and subsequently positing that Tintin himself is the books' hero 'because he is the best reader' (21) - McCarthy continually seizes on moments in which he finds interpretations and readings within the books being challenged or completely undone. Perhaps not surprisingly, given his theoretical approach to the material, McCarthy's analyses are rife with post-structural and post-modern tropes: the books are 'full of erasure' (30); the stories display an opposition 'between the sacred and the profane' (50); 'over the course of the books' both friendship and politics become 'hollowed-out' (57); Herge 'delights in doubling' (19), and thus 'Copying, imitating, passing off' (121) and 'the issue of the simulacrum' (157) are all prominent themes; Tintin himself, 'His face, round as an O with two pinpricks for eyes,' (32) is the epitome of nothingness, 'a typographic vanishing point . …
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