As its title says, this book features Tintin—yes, the character from the comics by Hergé—but not Tintin of the comics exactly, not quite. It’s a funny book, and satisfyingly allusive; the language is often overblown but it works. At the book’s opening Tintin is bored of Marlinspike, of the winter weather keeping him indoors, of life without adventures: “‘All the winter the north wind roamed on the hills; many trees fell in the park’” (p 9). That’s the first sentence; it’s also a quotation, from “Esther Waters: poor Tintin, trapped in a Victorian novel! Luckily, the scene changes soon: a letter from Brussels (Avenue du Vert Chasseur, where Hergé lived for a time) arrives: Tintin is to go to Machu Picchu, along with his old companions, Captain Haddock and Snowy.
Once in Peru, Tintin finds himself at a hotel where, among the other guests, there’s a foursome of characters from Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain: there is dinner-table philosophizing, there is intrigue and seduction, there is mysticism. Tintin, the boy detective, grows up—or at least, discovers sex, then grows up; there is talk of art; there is talk of myth; there is talk of revolution. In this new world Tintin only dreams of outlaws and criminals; in waking life, there is no crime to solve, though there are wrongs to set right, the wrongs of colonialism and imperialist violence. Tintin, by the end of the story, is indeed immersed in the new world: instead of quotes from a Victorian novel by an Irish writer, the last chapters quote Henry James, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and James Fenimore Cooper. Captain Haddock and Snowy have gone home, but Tintin’s stayed behind, and, perhaps, become enlightened in the process.
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