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The one in white with the yeti The white expanses of the Himalayan mountains, the sparseness of the pared down plot and the cast, all come as a welcome antidote to the huge clutter of ideas, characters and slapstick of The Red Sea Sharks , making Tintin in Tibet (even the title has a neat simple alliterative symmetry) a rather atypical adventure, one inspired by a personal crisis - Hergé at this time suffering from nightmares and visions of whiteness - rather than being merely the usual Tintin investigative jaunt through exotic lands meeting interesting characters. Atypical it might be, but in other ways it's a pure distillation of everything that is great about Hergé's technique both in terms of the storyline and in terms of the purity of the 'l igne-claire ' artwork. Tintin's tenacity to get to the truth is never more driven than here in his desire to travel to Nepal and embark on a seemingly futile expedition in search of his young Chinese friend Chang who has s...

The one where Tintin uncovers the slave trade There's a great deal going on in The Red Sea Sharks , but strangely at the same time nothing much really happens. Although based on a real story that Hergé read in the newspapers about modern day slavery, Tintin and Captain Haddock's part in uncovering the illegal trade of humans is rather haphazard, the two of them (with Snowy) hopping on planes and boats without really seeming to arrive anywhere and get started on an investigation. An unfortunate tendency of their transportation to catch fire, blow-up or fall apart might have something to do with this. Recurrent motifs are really all The Red Sea Sharks has going for it in place of a clear linear investigative plot, from the problems with their transportation to Captain Haddock, a man normally averse to the stuff, continually finding himself with water splashed in his face. This kind of thing is common in Hergé's work, but usually takes a back seat to the main story, providing...

The one where Calculus is kidnapped The Calculus Affair comes in the wake of Hergé's greatest achievements in the Tintin series which peaked with the double-length works, Destination Moon / Explorers on the Moon , The Seven Crystal Balls / Prisoners of the Sun and The Secret of the Unicorn / Red Rackham's Treasure . The qualities that are evident in those books are all here in The Calculus Affair , the story packed with amusing incidents and adventure, strong characterisation, entertaining secondary characters and superlative clear-line artwork that is not only well designed and laid-out, but expressive and dynamic. There's only one area in which The Calculus Affair is lacking from the double-features, and it might well have something to do with length; there's just not much room left for a decent plot. Essentially, although there is a little bit of a mystery at the start of the book with glass, crystal and ceramic objects shattering in Haddock's Marlinspike mans...

The one with the coloured-haired Thompsons and the fireworks The appearance of Thompson and Thomson in a Tintin adventure is more often than not an annoyance, their bungling of investigations and malapropisms having a very limited scope for comedy - a little of them goes a long way. Strangely however, when they have a larger role to play in a Tintin adventure, as here in Land of Black Gold and later in the Mission to the Moon books, they can be surprisingly entertaining. It's the Thompsons who - quite literally - drive Land of Black Gold forward, discovering in a rather explosive manner that there is something untoward going on with the nation's oil supplies. It's evidently not instigated by the auto-repair company that they initially set their suspicions on, but rather stems from a dispute between two Arab sheiks in Khemikhal. They set off to investigate, boarding the ship where Tintin, suspecting those on board the ship to be involved in the affair, has also managed to ...

The one with the giant spider Rather unusually for a Tintin adventure, The Shooting Star starts off like something out of a pulp science-fiction story as Tintin and Snowy identify a huge fireball heading rapidly towards Earth on a direct collision course. The end of the world is only hours away the scientists at the observatory tell him (and how does Tintin spend his last moments on Earth? - listening to the speaking clock!) ...except they've got their calculations wrong and instead of the fireball hitting the Earth, a smaller meteorite breaks off and lands in the Arctic ocean, causing a minor earthquake. Professor Phostle however has identified a new and unknown metal on the rock that he names Phostlite, and organises an expedition of European scientists to the Arctic to find it and examine it, taking along Tintin and Captain Haddock, who will be in command of the Aurora. As if an attempt to sabotage the ship even before it leaves port isn't enough, a rival foreign ship is on...

The one where Tintin first meets Captain Haddock The first Tintin to be published in its now classic standard full-colour 64 page format (as opposed to being first serialised and then reworked for collected publication), The Crab with the Golden Claws is however most notable for being the first Tintin adventure to feature Captain Haddock. Haddock's fondness for whisky is his most immediately apparent characteristic and one that would be consistent throughout later adventures, but here on their first meeting, the Captain's alcohol dependency presents a very sad case indeed.  The Captain is in such a bad state here that the running of his ship The Karaboudjan has been taken over by First Mate Allan, leaving him to nurse a bottle in his cabin while the crew carry on their opium smuggling operation. He cuts such a pathetic figure that he is of no help to Tintin, held captive himself aboard the ship while investigating their haul of mysterious crab meat tins, and is in fact in such...

The one where Tintin is ejected out of a plane Tintin's adventure in the Balkans perhaps doesn't have the same exotic allure as his excursions to the Andes, to Tibet, to the Sahara or the Moon, and consequently King Ottokar's Sceptre is somewhat underrated among the Tintin collection. Hergé however puts no less effort into his research and his creation of a political background for the state of Syldavia, going as far in this book as to include a brief brochure laying out the troubled history of the nation that comes across as realistic and authentic, giving the story a little more political depth. The story doesn't skimp on action and intrigue either, Tintin's investigative nose getting him into a lot of trouble when he refuses to take the hint and mind his own business. Returning a lost briefcase found in a park to a professor in the study of ancient seals, Tintin gets wind of something suspicious going on related to Syldavia and volunteers to accompany the profes...

Contact is written with such simplicity that you could be mistaken for imagining that a story like this almost writes itself, but there's much more going on beneath the surface than at first appears. On the surface the storyline appears quite straightforward. Dominic Pattison has a successful business in furniture manufacturing, an unexciting but relaxed and easy-going marriage to his wife Aileen, but then one day a young man called Sam turns up at his office showroom claiming he is the son from an affair Pattison had just before he got married. Pattison isn't convinced - the young man has an appearance and a thuggish character that Dominic can't relate to, but Sam also has an engaging personality and persuasive manner that gives Dominic pause for thought, at least until he has time to consider the implications of what it would mean to his life should what the young man says turn out to be true. The longer that Dominic resists the idea however, the more frustrated Sam beco...

Not as morose as the title and cover might suggest, The Widow's Tale is actually a sprightly and often humorous account of dealing with loss, attempting to deal with the absurdity of the situation it leaves one in and the strange affect it has on how other people relate to the whole bereavement process. That's not to say that the novel is neglectful of the wave of deep feelings, the emotions, the sense of loss and complete dismantling of one's life that occurs, but at the same time it's understood that there's a necessity to deal with them and it's precisely the good old fashioned just-get-on-with-it manner with the widow in question here that drives and sets the tone of The Widow's Tale - even if in her case that means running away from it all after the unexpected death of her husband and sitting it out in a small rented cottage in a remote Norfolk village. Noting her impressions down in the form of a journal, the observations here are wonderful - lightly...

The incident told at the start of Chang-rae Lee's latest novel was inspired by the experience of the author's father as a child in 1950, a North Korean citizen evacuated as the war intensified between North and South. His father's experience here transmogrified into the attempt of June Han to flee with her younger brother and sister, it's a heart-wrenching episode that sets the tone for what is to follow. Unexpectedly however, much of the remainder of the novel relates to an older June living in New York in the 1980s, who is suffering from a terminal illness and has just sold up her antique business, planning to go searching not for any of her lost siblings during the war, but for her son Nicholas - a young boy with a troubled childhood who has disappeared and is suspected to be living a life of fraud and petty crime in Italy.  The location and time period may change, but essentially the characteristics set out at the beginning of the novel remain constant. This is a bo...

Henry James's first full-length novel (1875) features a classic Jamesian situation, an entertaining, witty and tortuous examination of romantic feelings that are caught up in a frenzy of youthful impetuousness, ambition and artistic genius, complicated by the social expectations of others and the unfathomable workings of the female mind. If it isn't entirely successful on those terms, lacking the kind of precision that James would become better known for in later novels, there is however an interesting subtext to the story where James considers that other topic of interest to him regarding notions of identity from a European and an American perspective and whether there is any compatibility between them.  Such matters are considered not so much through the titular character as through the figure of Rowland Mallet, a young man from New England, with no fixed place in the world, no great ambitions, no woman or love in his life and no genius of his own. As a buyer and importer of ...