Since our case wasn’t being tried today, I headed into work for the first time in a few weeks. I’m having to take time off unpaid as I’ve gone over the ten days of jury duty that work will cover, so every day I can go in, I will, to minimize the damage.
In Red Rackham’s Treasure the Tintin family, so to speak, is finally complete. We’re introduced to Professor Calculus, and Captain Haddock buys back his family’s ancestral home, Marlinspike, from which many subsequent adventures are based. Calculus’ mishearing accounts for some of the laugh out loud funny moments in the book that still entertain on the umpteenth reading. His responses are usually absurd non-sequiturs, like this exchange:
Captain Haddock: It worries me a bit that Tintin hasn’t come up again…
Professor Calculus: No, but I was a great sportsman in my youth…
Hergé’s storytelling is very self-assured at this point. The characters’ primary goal in the story is the discovery of the shipwreck of the Unicorn, but at the moment Tintin locates it, Hergé distracts us with Calculus and his divining pendulum; we’re not even with Tintin when he finds it. The menace of the Bird Brothers, captured at the end of the previous book, lingers over this story, and despite the fact that the story is on the surface a simple sea-faring treasure hunt, Hergé keeps us guessing until the end and manages a very satisfying and surprising twist.
Some notes:
I have a memory of a nautical shop in Copenhagen that reminded Scott and I very much of the dive shop in the book; I for one was convinced that Hergé had used the Danish shop as a model for his creation.
The book features some of Captain Haddock’s earliest run-uns with animals, during which he really begins to hit his creative cursing stride. His arguments with parrots, horses, and llamas will continue to provide comic relief throughout the series.
The copy I read was one of our classic old copies, whose front and back cover have separated from the rest of the book. It features one or two weird moments where Tintin’s hand shows up yellow, and another where the same scene from one page to the next is a radically different hue. I could never tell if it was on purpose, but I’m pretty sure now that they were just printing errors.
