Alph Art

And poor pastiche

Et L’Alph Art

This is a brief pastiche, an effort to pick up where Hergé, the author of the Tintin stories, left off. Hergé had begun a thinking of a book called Tintin and Alph-Art, got quite far into the ideation and planning stages, and then died before the book could be completed or even fully mapped out, as if for an executor. Hence the interesting volume, produced by Studios Hergé years later, combining notes, sketches, bits and pieces, in an attempt to give the story some life, to put on the page what could be gathered up from what was left.

All well and good.

And where things are incomplete, there will come along those who want to put things together, to supply an answer to the mystery, or at least to see familiar characters and pleasing settings put to further employment.

This is not a successful pastiche. Not because the unnamed illustrator and writer lacked heart. I think that person — whosoever they may be — had some passion. Not because their translation software (presumably from French to English, but who knows?) was subpar. Although it may have had something to do with that. It’s just possible the author here was attempting to write in slightly broken English without dictionary or machine translation, and that would be commendable.

No, I think this story fails because it has no point, no purpose. It plays a little with the setting of the original Alph-Art, but it does nothing with it, takes it to no strange, new places.

But I get ahead of myself. What is the Alph-Art’s setting? And what is an Alph-Art in the first place?

The Alph-Art is a state of creation. The Alph is taken to mean a cipher or glyph: a letter, in other words. A character. Like the letter ‘H.’ That would do nicely. Imagine the letter ‘H.’ And then — hence the hyphenation — the letter in question is made into art. Imagine that ‘H’ again. Rotate it, if you are able, in your mind. And think about all the ways an artist might wish to represent the ‘H’ — all the innumerable ways.

In The Alph-Art, Tintin and Captain Haddock are thrown into a conspiracy thriller that begins, at least, in satire of the art world. They are forced off the street and into a gallery which is showing the works of a very fascinating new artist, a man before whom every critic and buyer swoons in theatrical unison.

And what does this great artist do? He depicts letters, those letters we’ve just discussing, in the boldest and most straightforward ways. They’re loud and vivid and not doing much save existing. He does not hide them. They are not coquettishly peeking out from behind fans or draperies. Not hiding in the background or foreground like the distorted skull in The Ambassadors. No, these letters are simply out and proud: standing there boldly in statues or paintings.

Captain Haddock, upon finding an ‘H,’ is a little taken with it. He decides to buy it (and being rich, he can do so), and to spend much of the rest of the surviving narrative pondering the letter. What can its meaning be? He is very hip and with it, the captain thinks (and says), because he is patronising this modern art.

Tintin is game to read more about art, of course. He always wants to learn. But a mystery soon demands his attention. Art dealers want to talk to Tintin; they ask him to meet them on the quiet. And then, of course, trouble comes a-knocking. Some of the art dealers, the connoisseurs, start dying. Mysteriously or shockingly, and in ways that cannot be accidents. And then the hunt is on, the game is afoot, the chase is begun. The chase and hunt and game to do, well, what, exactly? Of course, we readers do not know. We’re never told, never let in. The tomb has sealed the author’s intentions forever. And his lips are silent.

And this, of course, is where other voices and other pens get involved. And it brings us, again, to this poor pastiche effort that I’m discussing today. It’s set in the same world as The Alph-Art. In the same universe: the art cosmos where up is down and rubbish is worth many thousands of dollars. But it is also set in a tiny part of that world: the gallery we’ve already discussed. The one where Captain Haddock and Tintin find themselves, and from which the captain purchases, as I’ve said, an enigmatic ‘H.’

And it’s here, in that gallery, that we the readers are trapped. Trapped with Tintin and Haddock, trapped as the author shows us more of what was, even when done by Hergé, quite a lame satire of the art world. We have more and more of the elaborately bearded and costumed artist. More and more of his colourfully dressed contemporaries. Beatniks, hippies, new age types.

This isn’t very funny, and nor is it all that dramatic. Not much happens. Tintin and Haddock ponder the art, as they do in The Alph-Art, or at least the draft of it. At one moment they permit themselves to go dancing, where the captain is bamboozled by the music but Tintin stays cool. And once or twice, Tintin talks to the gallerina, who seems a good deal more generously proportioned in this comic than she did in The Alph-Art’s sketches. Not that I particularly noticed her in the original.

This is a poor effort. It’s not well-drawn or well-written. There’s little to recommend it. But, as ever, I enjoy the spirit of works like this. Recall the numbers of authors who’ve tried to finish The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and who have kept trying for over a century after Dickens died. Using such unfruitful ground: with the mystery not just unwritten but even unplanned out on paper. Many people have wracked their brains trying to solve that question, and to write about it.

There was even a trial, if you remember, in London, in which literary personalities of the day (Shaw, Chesterton) attempted to convict or to acquit a fictional character for a murder in an unfinished novel.

People care a good deal about this kind of thing.