A very intriguing work, to say the least. For anyone who spent years studying the humanities, attempting to draw links from the most intangible evidence in film and literature, this book will instantly appeal to their cheeky side. A lot of it is clearly based on the old scholar's mantra of "choose a position first, find the evidence later", and I'm sure that if you took any author's oeuvre of an equivalent size, you'd be able to find a similar number of connections.

However, I honestly don't mean to sound negative - there's a lot to enjoy here. Any fan of Herge's series will have to take a little away from this at the least, with McCarthy drawing intriguing parallels between various modes of literary analysis and philosophy, and the 24 albums in the "Tintin" canon. The "Castafiore's Clit" section is perhaps the most convincing, while his in-depth probing into the Haddock family history is inspired.

I wasn't convinced by a great deal of this book, and there were sections I thought were absolute balderdash, but surely that is true of any academic study of literature. Here's to McCarthy for writing this intriguing work. (And if nothing else, perhaps THAT is the "secret of literature": that we can make any answer out of it that we will?)

(One final thought: I heartily agree with McCarthy that "The Castafiore Emerald" may be the - pardon the pun - jewel in Herge's crown. The most surprising thing was to read reviews of McCarthy's book which denounced his opinions, on the basis that "Emerald" is a cosmic bore. Really!?) ( )

This literary analysis book attempts to answer the question of whether Tintin is really literature or not. Except that it never quite gets there. It instead relies on the bawdy and controversial - things like a chapter called "Castafiore's clit", or questioning whether Hergé was a Nazi - to entice readers in. It gets wild with conjectures later on, too.

To be sure, there's a lot of interesting stuff in there. It talks about Hergé's heritage - that he might be descended from an illegitimate son of a noble - and compares this to Sir Francis Haddock, implied to be the son of Louis XIV in the French edition. It's not an original idea, but I think this is the first I've heard of it.

I've read other books that are about the background to Tintin, but they've always been implicitly or explicitly "on Hergé's side", like defending him against accusations of fascism. This book comes from an analytical angle, not defending or attacking him.

Despite never coming down on one side or the other of the central question, the book draws a lot of comparisons between Tintin and French literature, so I found it interesting. Just a bit crazy in parts. ( )

This book is essentially a PhD thesis about the 'hidden layers' beneath the Tintin comics. And it reads exactly like a PhD thesis: one for the devotees only.

I really wonder what Hergé would have made of this book. As much as I admire the genius of the Belgian master, something about Tintin and the Secret of Literature feels like shooting a fly with a cannon. Enormous scholarly leaps of logic are made, such as "The Castafiore Emerald" being a metaphor for Bianca Castafiore's clitoris. Seriously!

This book is a page-turner, in the pejorative sense. I was constantly skipping forward, wondering if McCarthy was approaching any sort of worthwhile conclusion. The answer, for me, was no.

For the record, Harry Thompson's Tintin: Herge and His Creation is the best analytical book I have read on Tintin, to this date. Rather than attempting to describe the Tintin canon with McCarthy's subject-by-subject grouping, Thompson works effectively in a chronological book-by-book evaluation of Tintin and Hergé's career. Thompson's book is concise and unadorned with the lavish illustrations of the officially-sanctioned Tintin: The Complete Companion, but it remains the most effective and efficient Tintin chronicle. ( )

An absolutely fascinating discussion of the internationally popular series, applying contemporary literary criticism techniques, finding implications in the artistic and intellectual content of writers extending from Poe and Baudelaire to Sciascia, with Raymond Roussel always lurking just offstage. To be read and re-read. ( )

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1590875.html

McCarthy looks at Hergé's adventures of Tintin and finds all kinds of hidden material - tracking recurrent themes through the entire œuvre, including such issues as sepulchres, mirrors, castration, and the true and incredible meaning of the Castafiore Emerald.

I was particularly impressed, as I always am in books like this, by the relation made by McCarthy between Hergé's work and his life. Remi (to use his real name) shifted uneasily from his pre-war racism and anti-Semitism to a more liberal approach, generated perhaps by the very fact of writing in Nazi-occupied Belgium - a passive collaboration which he never quite expiated. And his grandmother, working in an aristocratic household not far from my own home village, rather mysteriously conceived his father and uncle (who used to wander around as if they were twins) and then married Mr Remi whose name was borne by her sons and their descendants, leading to the sort of genealogical fuzziness that can give you two obviously identical twins called Thompson and Thomson. As to who Hergé's real grandfather was, Belgian royalists can only speculate.

There were a couple of points that I did not really get in the course of McCarthy's argument. Much is made of Barthes' assessment of a short story by Balzac, ending in a 'vanishing point', holding 'the signifier of the inexpressible', a concept that didn't really convey much meaning to me. And I would have liked to see also some wider discussion of the geopolitical setting of the post-1945 Tintin stories, considering that the global situation is so crucial in the earlier volumes.

But basically it's a good painless introduction to literary theory by means of a well-known, well-loved canon; when McCarthy sneers in the introduction at 'Buffy-the-Vampire-Slayer-as-Postmodern-Signifier conferences', he is sneering also at himself I think (certainly it's an unfortunate line which undermines his own argument). ( )