Le Secret de la Licorne by Hergé
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Collectors Amok, or the Past in the Present, or Ever a Pleasure When I was a kid, I avidly read Hergé’s Adventures of Tintin in English translations. I loved to open a book and immerse myself in the Tintin world of clean lines, vibrant colors, vivid details, and dynamic action. Whether Tintin was solving mysteries or exploring in South America, East Europe, North Africa, the Himalayas, the Arctic Ocean, China, the Moon and so on, Hergé’s art, layouts, characters, and adventures were exotic and unambiguous, exciting and comical, cartoonish and realistic. I often read aloud, giving different voices to the different characters, like the intrepid cowlicked young reporter/explorer Tintin (a straight man for the outre characters around him), the alcoholic Captain Haddock (joyful, maudlin, or berserk when drunk), the incompetent and clumsy twin detectives Thomson and Thompson, absent-minded and hard of hearing genius Professor Calculus, and the cute, frank, doggy, and loyal terrier Snowy. Twenty years later while preparing for a graduate school French proficiency exam, I read Hergé’s Les Aventures de Tintin in the original French, enjoying them as much as when I’d been a kid. And recently I happened to watch—and dislike—Spielberg’s Tintin movie. It jams together parts of at least three books while leaving out some of the best parts, fabricates a new villain, indulges in too much showy non-stop action, inflicts constant egregious John Williams music, removes Snowy’s charm and “spoken” thoughts, adds a totally out of character dialogue in which Captain Haddock (!) gives Tintin (!) a corny morale raising speech about never giving up, and so on. Although Spielberg and company impressively capture the surface look of some scenes and characters from the original comics, their 3D CG approach makes it all feel less real and less appealing than in the original comics. Thus, the movie made me want to re-read the books, and I started with Le Secret de la Licorne (1943) because it’s one of my favorites. Le Secret de la Licorne is great. Into it Hergé interweaves two plots, one featuring a serial pickpocket targeting men’s wallets and one featuring three cryptic scrolls hidden inside three antique model ships and supposedly indicating the location of a pirate treasure. The pickpocket leads to a clever deus ex machina in the end and adds another layer to the book’s themes about our desires for material things, as with overly avid collectors. The stubborn model ship aficionado Ivan Ivanovitch Sakharine and the ruthless antique dealing Loiseau brothers are, then, mirrored by the well-organized pickpocket Aristide Filoselle, who, he says, is not a thief but a passionate collector of wallets. Even Tintin and Captain Haddock become eager to find a treasure. Of course, the Loiseaus are villainous partly because, unlike Sakharine and Filoselle, who genuinely love model ships and wallets, the brothers care nothing for the antiques they deal in, seeing them only as sources of money. And Tintin and the Captain are the moral compasses of the book, so they sure wouldn’t do anything unethical to pursue a treasure! Moreover, the plot originates from Tintin’s desire to give his nautical friend a model ship for a present. The prime part of the sixty-two-page book is a brilliant fourteen-page sequence early on in which Captain Haddock recounts—and reenacts—the adventure of his doppelganger ancestor the Chevalier Francois de Hadoque when, in 1698 in the Antilles his magnificent frigate the Licorne (Unicorn) was attacked by a smaller pirate ship captained by Rackham Le Rouge (Red Rackham). After an exchange of canon-fire, the pirates board the Licorne, resulting in a ferocious melee, with the Chevalier fighting off numerous pirates until he’s captured, after which he must try to find a way to escape. Throughout the sequence, Captain Haddock channels his late 17th-century ancestor, with the pictures of the Captain acting everything out for Tintin in the present, alternating seamlessly and amusingly with the pictures of the ancestor fighting etc. in the past, including props like the battered furniture, skewered pillows, and bottles of rum of the Captain’s apartment. Conflating past and present, it’s a visual and textual tour de force. And if you have a pirate fetish (as I did when a kid), the fourteen pages will scratch your itch. The book features impressive frames showing a busy marketplace or a sailing frigate or a country road and includes plenty of kinetic (often slapstick) action and a variety of camera angles and all of the best tricks that comics can perform when combining text and sequential pictures. There are amusing sequences featuring the detectives Dupont and Dupond (Thompson and Thomson) struggling with stairs, their hats, or a pickpocket, Milou (Snowy) tracking Tintin through the countryside, and Tintin fleeing from the ruthless antique dealers and their huge dog. As usual in Hergé’s work, there’s plenty of drops of sweat (especially conveying astonishment) and stars (especially conveying pain), but, despite stabbings, shootings, trippings, punchings, and the like, no blood. And no romance—except for Tintin and Captain Haddock’s eternal bromance. Sometimes Hergé overdoes action scenes, as when the chases, escapes, and fights etc. add excitement but don’t move the plot. There are a few sequences of panels where nothing interesting happens visually, when characters stand or sit and talk to each other so Hergé can info dump. At one point, Tintin gets a villain to spill the beans for ten frames in which large text-filled speech balloons nearly force the two characters out of the panels. Thankfully, the racist stereotypes of the early books like Tintin in the Congo are absent here (apart from the absence of people of color!), but the only female characters are an earnest landlady or two and a troublesome woman inopportunely occupying a public phone booth in the rain. Anyway, I can’t help it—I’ll always love rereading the adventures of Tintin. Le Secret de la Licorne is the first of a two-part story, the second volume being Le Trésor de Rackham le Rouge (Red Rackham’s Treasure), in which Tintin and the Captain organize a search for sunken pirate treasure. I am looking forward to it! View all my reviews
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