Fuel, Air, Bomb

Tintin on the sweating sands

Land of Black Gold by Hergé

You know the drill. Things are going badly, disastrously wrong at home. Wars and rumours of wars abound. And across the land, a strange thing keeps happening. Fuel is exploding. The petrol in pumps, the diesel dotted about, the fuel in cigarette lighters.

Boom!

Smoke erupts from the car’s engine.

Boom!

The garage is filled with wrecked models.

Why is this all happening? No one is any the wiser. The oil companies, the petrol refiners, they’re all stumped. On the phone, the chairman of one of these firms is talking to his top research chemist.

Any progress? he asks — progress on the mysterious detonations.

And all the research chemist can tell him is that he ought to put some more money into the investigation.

When the chairman asks why, we cut to the research chemist in his wrecked and ruined lab, one through which explosions have slammed like hurricane-force winds.

You’ll want to have a lab at the end of the process, won’t you? he implies to his boss.

Tintin, boy reporter, boy wonder, has been made aware of these strange detonations. His friends the Thompsons, inept detectives, have suffered more than one breakdown and more than one humiliation on that account. And all around Tintin, cars are backfiring. He goes to a garage to see what’s the matter and is met with automotive devastation. When he has a meeting with the oil company CEO, the man’s in bits.

I’d like to look into it, Tintin tells him, steely.

Go right ahead, the chairman tells him. I’d do anything to get to the bottom of this awful mystery.

And so, as he seems to do quite often, Tintin decides to skulk around the docks at nighttime. This is where the storage tanks of the contaminated fuels are kept. And while Tintin mooches and dawdles and looks about, he’s almost flattened by an aggressive sailor who’s been keeping a criminal rendezvous of his own (related, we are to believe, to the mysterious explosions), and is unhappy at the prospect of being spied upon in the process.

Tintin’s chased away by the maritime man, but before he goes, he conceives it clear and obvious in his head: there’s something going on with that shipping line or that ship. He must get aboard the latter to examine the former. And so Tintin, pretending to be a radioman — a ship’s sparks — gets himself accepted aboard the ship as it heads off.

Separately, the Thompsons try to pretend that they are simple sailors — dressed ridiculously, as is their wont — and are themselves inveigled aboard.

What happens next is, of course, down to Snowy the dog. Over time, Snowy has become less distinctive a character in these books. We hear his funny inner monologue less and less. We have fewer episodes where he acts independently of his master. Snowy is never the focus of the action any more; he’s part of it, but never its motive and driving force. Yet this time, it’s Snowy who causes all the trouble.

Because I’ve neglected to tell you how Tintin was not discovered by the gruff and uncouth sailor villain earlier. It’s because, although Tintin made some noise when he was observing the illegal deal going down on the waterfront, the sailor saw Snowy instead and thought, ‘it must be the dog.’ Just as a guard in a video game might be shot in the throat with the player’s arrow, barely survive, and then declare — after a minute’s cooling down — ‘must have been the wind.’

But Tintin has made the elementary mistake of bringing his distraction with him. As Tintin sits in the radio room, tapping out messages, the gruff and uncouth sailor villain notices Snowy on the ship.

It’s that dog he saw earlier, when he was trying to transact crooked business.

Remind me, who brought him onto the ship again?

Meanwhile, this man has also rumbled the two Thompsons.

He asked if they were police and they said, yes, how did you know?

And he told them that of course he knew; he was naval intelligence.

At this they, the detectives, spilled the beans most stupidly by saying — ah, so we are on the same team. When in fact they were not on the same team. This man was a villain. But they were not to know it.

It’s only when this villain is knocked silly in an unrelated accident (something to do with Tintin, of course) that his conniving and plotting comes to an end.

But upon arrival in Khemikhal, military police come aboard the ship and seize Tintin (and Snowy) and the Thompsons as suspected traitors and intriguers and conspirators — because the criminal and villain had hidden opium in Tintin’s room and given the Thompsons papers about drug smuggling (under the cover of his naval intelligence persona).

Thus Tintin and the Thompsons (and Snowy) are dragged ashore into an oriental fantasia which, I must admit, I don’t think corresponds to much — or really means anything. They’ll enter a world of rebellions and desert camps and the bombing of pipelines which is almost reminiscent of the Arab Revolt and the film epic Lawrence of Arabia. (I read the colourised, later version of this book, which was possibly redrawn to make it look more and more like the film.)

In plot terms, I think this is one of the weaker episodes of the series. Although the threat is real — war looms in the book just as it did in the world when this story was first printed in 1939 and 1940 — the reader does not feel much peril.

This is the story of an unlikely war in an imaginary desert nation. It is a fantasy built upon sand.