I've been closing in on the end of the 'Tintin' series for a few months now and this final album that was completed by Hergé himself before his death is a much better sendoff than the previous pair. 'The Castafiore Emerald' contained a great deal of fun but was hardly a traditional adventure for the Belgian journalist, given that nothing really happens. It's all about the characters. 'Flight 714 to Sydney' has plenty of adventure but falls apart before halfway and doesn't follow many of the standard rules that Hergé had established for the series. It never truly felt like a 'Tintin' album.

This, on the other hand, does, even if it's clearly meant to wrap up the series with many reunions. It had been eight years since 'Flight 714 to Sydney', which means sixteen after the last truly great entry, 'Tintin in Tibet'. Maybe Hergé had read reviews of his previous volume and they started to ring true for him, so he wanted to end his most famous series on a far more traditional note. If so, it worked. He returns us to San Theodoros, where we spent much of 'The Broken Ear' four decades earlier. It was in that album that we met General Alcazar, who's shown up many times since. Here, he's back in his own country, but in opposition, having been toppled by General Tapioca.

Tintin and Captain Haddock start out at Marlinspike Hall, far from any adventure, but the latter has been reading 'Paris Flash' and it seems that Bianca Castafiore, the Milanese Nightingale, has been singing her way across South America. San Theodoros is next on her schedule, where she will be received by Gen. Tapioca, a tyrant who's even changed the name of the capital, Los Dopicos, to Tapiocapolis. Gen. Alcazar has gone underground with the Picaros of the title, partisan guerrillas supposedly backed by the International Banana Company.

With that set, Hergé pauses to trawl in a whole slew of regular characters, surely because he felt like this was the final opportunity for them all to strut their stuff. By the second page, we've seen Castafiore, her maid Irma and accompanist Igor, along with Thomson and Thompson, supposedly to keep an eye on her jewels. By the third, there's Jolyon Wagg on the phone, complaining about how she got them insured through a different broker.

And then we divert into the running joke of the book, which is arguably one of its best, because it seems that Haddock can't drink whisky any more. It's his usual brand and Tintin (and Snowy) deem it completely normal, but it tastes like poison to him. He has to spit it out. This continues through the book, with more and more people able to happily drink what Haddock can't. It's like he's died and gone to Hell, where everything looks precisely the same except for that one crucial detail. It even reaches the point where it plays a key role in the regular plot. I liked it immensely.

That plot sparks when the news lets us know that Castafiore was arrested after her performance in San Theodoros. She's been accused of plotting against the government, because documents in her luggage suggest that there's a plot to depose Gen. Tapioca. Clearly that was a plant, but why? What reason would a South American dictator have to frame an Italian opera singer? Well, it's not just her, it seems. A San Theodoros government spokesman told the press that there are a trio of "principal figures in the plot" and then calls them out on international TV. Guess who they might be? That's right: Tintin, Haddock and Prof. Calculus.

Of course, it's all a ploy to manipulate our heroes to San Theodoros "for a full, free, frank and fair exchange of views", surely because of their acknowledged connection to Gen. Alcazar, which both Haddock and Calculus fall for, but Tintin follows on surreptitiously, because he's convinced that it has to be a trap. Which it is. Like, duh. However, it's being orchestrated by some deep cuts. Hergé apparently wasn't content to just reprise a location that we last visited in album six, he trawled in villains from other books, starting with Col. Esponja, who's really Sponsz, the Chief of Police from Szohôd in Borduria. Therefore, it must be Marshal Kûrvi-Tasch who's behind it all. We met them in 'The Calculus Affair', which also featured Bianca Castafiore.

While the plot does seem a bit of a stretch, it's done decently enough to work. It all seems blatant but there are subtleties in play and the intrigue deepens as the book runs on. The deep cuts keep on coming too, to the degree that I didn't recognise them all. Gen. Alcazar is a regular, of course, and I knew who Sponsz was immediately, but Pablo and Dr. Ridgewell from 'The Broken Ear' were less memorable. I'd forgotten about the Arumbaya tribe too, until they started to speak in a wild language that I remember well as a phonetic take on Cockney. "Gi' dahda vit!" indeed. For all my American readers, that's "Get out of it!"

If the intrigue is arguably the best aspect of the book, followed by the whole subplot of Haddock's sudden whisky aversion, which comes into focus late on, the worst aspect is surely the gimmick of having him lose his memory after being hit on the back of the head with a bottle. Fortunately, it's not a long-term thing and isn't particularly relied on by the plot, so he regains it quickly enough, after falling into water. He's attacked by a cayman but saved by an anaconda that whacks him on the top of the head. If that wasn't enough, he's shocked by an electric eel. Not his best moment, I should point out, but it's great fun for us to watch.

There's even a moment with Jolyon Wagg that didn't involve me wanting to punch him in the face, which rather surprised me. He has to be my least favourite character from the entire series. He's in San Theodoros for carnival, which is major stretch, but it's funny and I'm not as critical on final books in series as I am generally. This isn't up to the usual standard of the series, but it's perhaps appropriate to revisit 'The Broken Ear' because that was the first book to not be better than its predecessor. It was decent enough, but it followed an important album in 'The Blue Lotus' and it was soon overshadowed by the much better stories that followed it.

This fairly counts as "decent enough," too; but what's important is that it feels like a valid ending for the series, unlike its predecessor, 'Flight 714 to Sydney'. If Hergé wrote it because of how that book was received, he ought to have been satisfied. Now, for all that this talk of wrapping up this series, I have two books to go. A full decade on, one more album was published, 'Tintin and Alph-Art', but it was one that Hergé hadn't finished when he died in 1983. He had completed a slew of pencilled notes, outlines and sketches but hadn't yet turned them into a finished product.

It was subsequently completed by other hands and I have a version that was drawn by Yves Rodier and translated by Richard Wainman. I'll tackle that next month. Then I'll return to the very start of the series, because the first story written wasn't the first that I reviewed, 'Tintin in the Congo'. That was merely the first one published in album form in the English language. When most people were reading the many 'Tintin' books, 'Tintin in the Land of the Soviets' only existed in serialised black and white form in French. It was eventually translated for publication in album form in 1989, three years after the posthumous 'Tintin and Alph-Art'. Therefore I'm tackling that one last as a curiosity. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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