Balthazar Moderator
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#4 · Posted: 30 May 2007 09:55
I think (though this is from memory at the moment) that in the UK edition at least, Tintin tells the lieutenant that he never touches spirits, rather than alcohol in general.
Beer is obviously not as strong as spirits, and Tintin seems happy to have an occasional glass of beer, such as in the Black Island example you give, or earlier in The Crab when he joins the Thompsons for a drink. I know that plenty of hard drinkers get very drunk on beer alone, but I don't think beer would have the same "demon drink" connotations to moralistic Belgian readers as the whisky and rum that Captain Haddock is addicted to.
Historically, beer was often weaker than many brands are today. In the days before clean tap water, ale was much safer than water, and was the common thing to drink with a meal, without it really being considered a drink you'd get drunk on. Obviously, that's going back before Tintin's time, but I think it partly explains beer's place culturally. So, even in the rather moralistic atmosphere of 1930s and 40s Belgium, a young lad like Tintin having a single glass of beer probably wouldn't be regarded as proper "drinking". That's my theory, anyway.
As for the flask he carries for emergencies, I'd guess that officially that means an emergency where you'd have to rub it on someone suffering from hypothermia, and unofficially it means an emergency where you need to kickstart Captain Haddock out of a spell of defeatism. In either case, I don't think Tintin's ever planning to drink any himself.
And the whisky-drinking episode in Picaros is very much a one-off - something he has to try to do to not offend his Arumbay hosts. The fact that he's dreading it (even before the effects of Calculus's anti-alcohol drug are felt) emphasises how much he dislikes spirits, so the episode doesn't really contradict his anti-spirits position in the rest of the books.
Sadly though, the fact that he's taken Calculus's medicine presumeably means he'll never be able to enjoy a glass of beer in a Brussels café or British pub again. So you could say that he finally becomes strictly teetotal in this last completed adventure, even though he wasn't throughout the earlier books.
Edit: Just read your last post, Mark, which you posted while I was typing the above. I'd forgotten about that bit in The Broken Ear too. I guess that has to count as a serious lapse in his normal standards, though - as you say - facing execution somewhat excuses this! And interestingly, getting drunk is seen to benifit him (his drunken shouting is mistaken for bravery by Alcazar's advisor, and he's made a colonel), in contrast to Haddock's drunkenness in later books, which is nearly always seen to have bad consequences.
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