For various reasons, I’m not going to talk about the house right yet. (Oh, but I went to the charming Fair Oaks Horticultural Center yesterday. Delightful!) So instead I’m going to talk about musings on Tintin.
In Red Rackham’s Treasure the book has an unusual cutaway scene setup as an introduction. (Herge was probably attempting to mimic the cinema of the time) In a dockside bar two working men meet at a bar. One asks the other if he is still a ship’s cook, and the other, Bill, tells of how he is about to embark an an engagement with Tintin and Captain Haddock on the Sirius. This is the same cook in The Shooting Star. He accuses Snowy of stealing biscuits but the biscuits were actually stolen by Professor Calculus.
In Flight 714, the story was very much intended to be 1960s modern full of wonder of stream-line jets and international travel, all glass and streaming lines, as seen by a man born at the turn of the century. Herge pulls it off with flawless flair but it doesn’t have any depictions of the common every man that was one of the hallmarks of the earlier books. I read an Amazon review by someone who said he didn’t like seeing Tintin carrying a machine gun. Now that he mentions it…..
In King Ottokar’s Scepter, why on earth should Belgian Tintin care if there is an attempted overthrow of Syldavian royalty? I mean, if he had missed the the adventure and woke up and read about a coup in Slydavia would he even bat an eyelash.