Le Trésor de Rackham le Rouge by Hergé
My rating: 5 of 5 stars A Satisfying Conclusion to a Great Two-Part Adventure The twelfth Tintin book, Le Tresor de Rackham Le Rouge (1944), completes the two-part adventure started with Le Secret de la Licorne (1943). Whereas the first book features antique dealer skullduggery, pickpocketing, and late-17th-century pirates as Tintin and Captain Haddock try to secure three pieces of parchment that supposedly disclose the location of a treasure, this second part depicts the hunt for said treasure. Interestingly, despite the nefarious Maxime Loiseau escaping police custody early on, raising the specter of his interfering with Tintin and Captain Haddock’s treasure hunt, our heroes’ quest is complicated only by human greed (e.g., a motley mob of self-proclaimed descendants of Rackham le Rouge claiming the treasure), human error (e.g., a mistake as to which meridian to use when calculating degrees of longitude) and the dangers of undersea searches (e.g., sharks, limited oxygen, and unlimited old Jamaican rum). And instead of Loiseau, it seems as if the main antagonist for Tintin and the Captain is a new character introduced into the series here, Tryphon Tournesol (Professor Calculus), an absent-minded, virtually deaf, genius inventor who forces himself into the treasure hunt to test his new shark submarine. Calculus is stunningly both deaf and confident in his ability to understand what people say, quickly trying the Captain’s patience and eventually even that of the mild-mannered Tintin. Like most of Herge’s work, the art in the volume is clean-lined, simple, colorful, beautiful, dynamic, and appealing. The frames displaying the densely green jungle are exotic and alive. There is a wonderful half-page picture depicting a sunken shipwreck as Tintin walks towards it wearing a diving suit, surrounded by a yellow jellyfish, a pair of red fish, a pink anemone, a brown starfish, a school of blue fish, and numerous sea plants. The cover picture is prime, as Tintin and Milou (Snowy) ride across the frame in Tournesol’s shark submarine, cute Milou looking right at us, inviting us to open the book and enter the undersea world. In addition to being exciting (without any violent action scenes), the book is funny, featuring the slapstick antics of the Captain and the Dupont and Dupond (Thompson and Tomson) detectives, a cursing colony of parrots who learned to swear like Captain Haddock from his shipwrecked ancestor, the dangerous antics of some armed monkeys, and a pleasingly ironic conclusion to the treasure hunt that begins in the Caribbean under the sea, shifts to a deserted jungle island, and ends-- In addition to introducing Tryphon Tournesol and showing how the Captain comes to own Marlinspike Manor, the story demonstrates the dangers of set-mind thinking, the appeal of adventures in exotic settings, and the comfort of home. This two-book story (Le Secret de la Licorne and Le Tresor de Rackham Le Rouge) is probably my favorite of all Tintin adventures, up there with L’Etoile Mysterieuse, Tintin au Tibet, and Le Crab aux Pincers d’Or. View all my reviews
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Jefferson Peters
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