Review: Three Men on the Bummel

Three Men on the Bummel by Jerome K. Jerome
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A less successful follow-up to Jerome's extremely successful Three Men in a Boat, published a few years later. Both J. and Harris now have wives and children, though George is still single; the opening chapters are, in part, about convincing the wives to let them go on a trip together, this time a cycling holiday in Germany rather than a boating holiday up the Thames, all the while pretending that they don't actually need their wives' permission.

It very deliberately does not have the same travelogue feel as the first book; J. promises that there won't be any "scenery," by which he appears to mean the lyrical descriptions of places that are such a feature of Three Men in a Boat, and also that there will be no useful information (at least some of the "facts" presented are not at all factual). Somewhat surprising myself, and contrary to the general taste, I actually liked the lyrical bits and rather missed them here, but what we do have here are the comedy set-pieces, the scrapes and situations the three get into and the slice-of-life feel, with general observations on humanity and, in this case, Germany. The last chapter makes the prescient observation that the Germans, good-hearted people who always obey authority, will be fine as long as they have good rulers, but a bad ruler could take them down a dark path. There are plenty of absurd examples scattered throughout of German officials with no sense of humour, perspective, or logic who enforce nonsensical rules.

It's definitely a lesser book than its predecessor, but it has its charm and is often amusing.

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