Destination Moon / Explorers on the Moon

Hergé Destination Moon (1950) Explorers on the Moon (1953)
The first Tintin book I read as a child was either Flight 714 or Destination Moon, and the second was whichever of those two hadn't been first. We lived on a farm in rural Warwickshire serviced every two weeks by a mobile library, a sort of bread van full of books arranged upon shelves in the back, the arrival of which I found both magical and mysterious. I was working my way through their selection of Angela Banner's Ant & Bee books when I first noticed Tintin, which probably gives some indication of my age at the time. The cover of either Flight 714 or Destination Moon - whichever it was - intrigued me, displayed on the lower shelves with other larger format books such as Asterix in Spain, which I recall finding annoying because the characters on the cover seemed somehow arrogant. Then one day I guess my mother decided I was old enough to cope with Tintin, so that's where it started.

I read most of the Tintin books over the next couple of years, then graduated to Asterix's altogether wittier adventures, having at last overcome my weird aversion to the cover of the Spanish one. The books vanished from my shelves over the years, eventually reducing to just the hardback Tintin and the Lake of Sharks; and then the other night, seeking some more succinct, less aggravating relief from Tolkien, I realised I actually have a good few of these books and with no memory of their having returned to my collection, which is weird; so fuck it - Destination Moon, let's go, seeing as it's probably fifty years since I first read the thing, or indeed anything featuring Tintin.

Destination Moon and its sequel might be deemed hard science-fiction by certain definitions. Space travel was hardly a new idea in the fifties, having been a staple of the pulps for at least half a century, but Tintin belonged to an approximately sober, essentially realistic world for which Gernsbackian superscience would have been a poor fit. The forties had seen major advances in rocketry in the wake of the second world war, so it was only natural that Tintin should poke his investigative nose in at some point. Naturally the story conforms to the traditions of its kind, and so the first moon rocket is designed by Tintin's friend, Professor Calculus, then piloted by Tintin himself with all arrangements made according to nods, personal favours, and whoever feels they might like to give it a go. It's all very casual, even improbable, and yet it works because the story in which these characters are embedded is solid, as rigorously scientific as it can manage without quite lecturing. The timing is perfect and the art is breathtaking - both wonderfully simple and yet capable of dynamic elegance while conveying a technical sophistication which leaves your mouth hanging open.

So I'm reading something I probably first read when I was five, and yet it works just fine, not once leaving me feeling as though Destination Moon should be beneath me in the same way as - sorry - Harry Potter. Hergé apparently credited his readers with some intelligence and avoided talking down to them, and the humour, if gentle, is slapstick and more or less timeless aside from the slightly disconcerting realisation of just how much of it relies upon Captain Haddock's love of whisky. Being Tintin and hence a detective story at heart, there is inevitably a thread of nefarious deeds by representatives of foreign powers, typically culminating in revelations, exposure of the culprits, and arrest, but the thread runs through the story without overpowering it or turning it into Dick Barton; and it all remains quietly gripping, which is impressive when we consider the medium - a story told mostly inside a control centre then a rocket, with panels wherein those speaking are squashed into the lower third by dialogue. The sense of restraint induces a certain rhythm which carries everything along, so that when we come to the infrequent splash pages of that red and white chequered rocket in space or on the moon or about to take off, it's shocking and breathtaking all at once because it feels vaguely real, and it doesn't matter in the slightest that technology has since made such formative designs seem antiquated, along with the notion of a spacecraft piloted by levers and buttons.

Regardless of Hergé's having shot himself in the foot on several occasions with the institutional racism of the very first stories - and that whole grey area one tends to encounter with persons who collaborate during a Nazi occupation - lessons had been learned by this point and there's something good natured and wholesome about Tintin without it being preachy, sappy, or sentimental. The characters are likeable without bearing the burden of providing role models, and there's no dumbing down. Tintin was a wonderful start for me, progressive and inspiring my interest in a much wider world than the one I knew. I'm impressed that it has lost none of its power, and that it's still fun.