Tintin, unappealing but supreme
William Joll
THE VALLEY OF THE COBRAS: THE ADVENTURES OF JO, ZEITE AND JOCK° by Herge
Methuen, £4.95
Like most modern-day publishers, the house of Methuen is currently in close touch with its market: hence the publica- tion in English of a minor work by the creator of Tintin. Twenty years ago when, despite lip-service paid to French teaching in schools, we all considered the mastery of French as unnecessary as it has now be- come in the commercial world, there was considerable rage at the rate of translation of the Here classics — why couldn't we have Tintin au Congo in a more compre- hensible form? Much more recently Her- es work was singled out by the officers of Brent Council and his books removed from its library shelves (a decision which would have been quite enough in itself to per- suade me to move to a more salubrious area) and so a further generation will have been deprived of a literary experience as well-established on the continent as Coro- nation Street is here.
Curiously enough, the publication of this new book follows hard on the appearance of the famous 'underground' Tintin, Tintin au Pays des Soviets, written in 1930 some ten years before Jo, Zette and Jocko came on the scene. Comparison between the two does little for the latter. Of course it is aimed at a younger audience and the hu- mour is less sophisticated, but by the same token, Tintin au Pays des Soviets is publis- hed in rough format, unpolished and unco- loured; it is immediately apparent that des- pite the essentially unappealing character of Tintin himself, Herge has hit on a for- mula just as satisfying within its own stylis- tic limits as that of Goscinny and Uderzo with the Asterix series, and this is, further- more, in a book too early to include Had- dock, Calculus or the Thom(p)sons — though there is always Milou. Who could possibly resist a dog which complains, not for the first time, of hunger en route for Moscow: 'Impossible de me rappeler quelle epoque j'ai fait mon dernier repas'?
In reading The Valley of the Cobras it is difficult to see the Herge spark, the genius of the massively influential cartoonist ho- noured by Europeans in 1984 with an exhi- bition in Barcelona which included a pic- ture entitled 'Milou sous l'influence combi- née de Lewis Carroll et du Loch Lomond' — Haddock's preferred brand of whisky. The quality of the drawing in the book is as crisp as chez Tintin and there is almost the same fluidity to the narrative flow, but there is a woodenness to the characters, a French engineer and his wife, two children and a pet monkey, which stands in too extreme a contrast to the sub-Haddockian volatility of the fall-guy, the Maharajah of Gopal. Published in 1940, just after the German occupation of Belgium, The Val- ley of the Cobras falls between The Land of the Black Gold and The Crab with the Gol- den Claws: I find myself in agreement with the leading Tintiniste of my acquaintance, a recluse living near Bury St Edmunds, who said that reading them in sequence would be like looking at a Bouguereau flanked by Titians.
All Here's books can be purchased from Pilot, 34 Floral Street, London WC2E 9JD. 01-836 1131.
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