Review by eleanorjmca - L'Oreille cassée

eleanorjmca 's review for:

L'Oreille cassée by Hergé

2.0

adventurous funny lighthearted fast-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Plot

Strong character development: No

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: Complicated

Flaws of characters a main focus: No

This is a difficult book to rate, largely because it’s nearly a century old and it’s difficult to look past the casual racism, cultural imperialism, and even anti-semitism that crops up on nearly every page. For this reason I just couldn’t give the book 3 stars, which is what the story probably deserves; no amount of “it’s of its time” makes it comfortable for a modern reader when Tintin évadés capture by the bad guys using blackface, or the owner of an antique shop is a stereotypical antisemitic caricature for a throwaway one-panel joke.

The plot of this story basically revolves around Tintin attempting to retrieve an idol stolen from the Ethnography Museum (yikes), an adventure which takes him to South America and back and gets him entangled with all kinds of disreputable characters (most of them arguably racist to some level or another). For a journalist, supposedly, Tintin isn’t very interested in covering any of the exotic places he ends up in or interviewing anyone. He is also either catastrophically unlucky or blessed by God depending on your perspective: he evades death by firing squad, being blown up, repeatedly shot at, struck by lightning, knocked out by heavy objects several times, canoeing into a waterfall, shot by poison darts, attacked by native tribespeople and almost drowning. Milou the dog is less lucky and manages to get kicked twice, have the end of his tail shot off, and almost get sacrificed by the Arumbayas. The action scenes in this story are fun and exciting, although occasionally it’s hard to follow who exactly is shooting at who, and the in general the tone is lighthearted despite the highly perilous situations our hero finds himself in. The art is nice, the “detective-style” scenes at the beginning before all the real action starts are charming, and somehow there is some quite scathing critique in there of the relationship between European commercial interests and wars in the Global South (in the form of General American Oil and the double-dealing arms merchant). But on the plot front, it’s not an expertly crafted book. The pacing is quite weird, Tintin’s period as a colonel in the army goes on way too long, it’s hard to keep track of everyone, and when the Arumbaya tribe finally do appear

they barely feature at all and we instead hear their story via a European explorer - “un blanc”, as Tintin exclaims with some relief.

In the end,

the diamond which we have been told was a sacred stone stolen from the Arumbaya tribe ends up in the sea, while the idol is restored to its place in the museum after a book’s worth of Tintin cheerfully explaining he needs to “return the idol to Europe”. The continued possession of the idol is vaguely explained by it having been given as a gift to the ethnographer who initially visited the Arumbayas, but the diamond gets entirely forgotten about.

I don’t expect books written in the highly conservative environment of the 1930s to be bastions of progressive thinking, but that doesn’t make them any easier to read today.

That said, I will be picking up more Tintin, partly because I am using them to help practice my French and partly because the art really is nice and I like the dog. Tintin himself has yet to impress me, but he has about twenty more books in which to succeed.

Content Warnings