Review: Three Men in a Boat

Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

On reread, this is funnier than I remember. Rather like Tristram Shandy, J. (as Jerome's friends call him in this book) is given to wandering off into a digression and forgetting what he was doing. His digressions are sometimes lyrical rhapsodies on the beauties, natural and constructed, to be seen along the River Thames, but also often anecdotes which feel like real life, just a little bit exaggerated and heightened for absurd comic effect.

That's pretty much how the whole book works, in fact. J. and his two friends, George and "Harris" (actually Hentschel), did often take boating trips on the Thames, but this specific one is fictional, as is the dog of which the title parenthetically says nothing. So the encounter in Connie Willis's To Say Nothing of the Dog , in which, if I remember rightly, the dog Montmorency was spotted along with the three friends, could not actually have happened, slightly to my disappointment. It was written shortly after his honeymoon trip on the river, but drawing on memories of trips with his friends.

It started out as a travel guide, and still has that as its spine and organizing principle, but the comic novel took over and led to its success; it's now been in print continuously for a hundred and thirty years, and sold over a million copies in the first 20 years.

I think the reason it succeeded, and continues to succeed, is that it's relatable. Here are three young men, with some education but not socially elevated, financially successful (so far; all of them were later) or established in their careers. They all deride each other as lazy idiots, but nevertheless are clearly solid friends, undertaking a trip for which they've prepared poorly and encountering difficulties that they're ill-equipped for, yet somehow winning through, discomforted but not truly harmed. It's an everyman's adventure, which got it a lot of snobbish criticism at the time it was published, but also made it immensely popular. This was a time when such leisure was first coming into the reach of the common man, which probably accounts for a lot of the pushback.

The style of the humour reminds me not only of Tristram Shandy but of the American humourist Patrick F. McManus, and his accounts of his youthful wilderness adventures with his buddy Retch Sweeney and the old mountain man Rancid Crabtree. It has the same kind of self-deprecating exaggeration, like a fish story directed against yourself.

The ending feels a touch abrupt; the weather turns bad, and rather than continue on the river, the friends abandon their trip and take a train back to London and its comforts. But this, too, somehow fits with the overall feel. This is a safe adventure, not into the true wilds but in civilized places, just with a bit of discomfort self-imposed by choosing to camp out (and by a limited budget and a lack of practical skills). It's what's now referred to as "cozy"; low stakes, firm friendships (under the mutual insults), and a throughline that isn't really a plot, but is provided, in this case, by the travel itinerary.

It inspired many other comic novels, and I'm reading one next, H.G. Wells' The Wheels of Chance: A Bicycling Idyll .

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