Not for children

Tom McCarthy Granta, £8.99

Reasoning that what's good enough for Tintin is good enough for the rest of us - sleuthing, decoding and exploring in all literal and metaphorical senses - Tom McCarthy sets out to prove that the Tintin canon contains nothing less than "the secret of literature itself".

If you haven't read Hergé's complete oeuvre, don't bother opening this book. McCarthy is a nerd beyond compare, the envy of the tintinologist.org geek-elite. He can tell you how a fictional language connects the anti-hero of Flight 714 to a ship in The Crab with the Golden Claws. And he's pretty hot on real languages, too: did you know poison' and gift' have shared origins?

McCarthy's detailed research is evidently brilliant; his conclusions less so. Although commendably lightly-written, a whiff of beret-wearing pretension pervades the 200-odd pages (some of them very odd). Borrowing from Derrida, Freud, Barthes and others, McCarthy determines that Captain Haddock's pipe is a mini-sceptre; tobacco is a signifier "of law, of hospitality and legacy"; a plaster-cased leg is an erection; and plenty worse.

My lumpen Britishness forbids me to accept such notions without proof that they need be true (Francophones seem rather more inclined to find' crypto-sex in children's culture: witness The Tellytubbies). The suggestion that "what is important is not that they get the reading right' but that it opens up a space for other readings to take place in" makes me intensely suspicious.

No child could - or should! - read this. McCarthy's chief success is to make adult fans rush to the attic to fetch down those great adventures they chain-read in their youth. For all the lit-crit gobbledygook, though (and albeit possibly for the wrong reasons), Tintin and the Secret of Literature is a fun read. Just keep your tongue firmly in cheek, and try not to bite it off.

Hergé's Adventures of Tintin is at Oxford Playhouse until August 25.