Three Men in a Boat

This book, a shortish comedic novel of 1889 by Jerome K. Jerome, is just funny. I picked it up just after Freshers' Week as bag-book to read in libraries when bored of reading course material. Anyway - in the book, narrator J. and his friends George and Harris are all comfortably-middle-class young men (of strangely almost indistinguishable personality) who find themselves with little excitement with which to fill their days, and so they do what comfortably-middle-class young men of Victorian England did for diversion - and go boating. The three of them and J.'s incorrigible fox-terrier Montmorency (what a fantastic name for a dog) thus pack, with much slapstick difficulty, arrange a boat, with much slapstick difficulty, and proceed to row up the Thames from Kingston to Oxford, with slapstick difficulties ensuing all over the place. Beleaguered by rain, steamboats, struggles with locks and tents and towropes, George's appalling banjo-habits, Harris's propensity for mangling comic songs, mendacious fishermen, Montmorency's urges to generally destroy things, and above all their own amusingly-sketched ineptitude, their brief travel proves infuriating but refreshing, and a hilarious delight to read.

   Generously interspersed through their haphazardly-described boat trip are dozens of rambling anecdotes, tied to the main plot with very little effort or need as they are in themselves so buoyant with potential mirth. Irrelevant as they are it is these that give the book its flavour - a levity, a wit, that doesn't read like planned comedy scenes but more like you are in the boat with the three men, bored of watching the river and so talking endlessly, and running on into odd little "that reminds me of that time when" stories and "always seems to happen that" reflections. And needless to say, they are extremely funny (do not make my mistake of reading this book on the bus, or in a silent study area, or anywhere else where unexpected snorts of laughter might earn a disapproving glance). The 19th century language deepens the humour; verbose and civilised, the dry wit of the passages is very conversational indeed, and so the text reads as easily as it provokes a chuckle (i.e. very).

   Perhaps my favourite thing about the book though was the fact that it wasn't originally meant to be a funny novel. In the introduction I learned that Jerome set out to write more of a historical guidebook up the Thames - something that does clearly show through in the longish passages describing a local area's geographical features or what the Romans or some monks or Oliver Cromwell might have done in a particular passing town. To lighten the prose of this readable tour, the author added in several anecdotes about his past boating ventures through the places described, and eventually found that the supplementary funny material elbowed aside the non-fiction musings. So the book turned into a story about J. and Harris and George and Montmorency travelling this historically-and-geographically-interesting landscape, but having inconsequential squabbles and failures and remembrances along their way.
   The very fact that this happened to his story along the way surely speaks something vaguely grand about the purpose of fiction, non-fiction, and books - I'm not sure what. It it good though that however interesting a real topic, it will be enjoyed better if elucidated firsthand by someone who seems to only do so as an afterthought to describing the hilarious muddle they have otherwise made of their efforts to access the topic, not to say reflect endlessly on a host of other disconnected and uninformative but worth-hearing things. If the 125ish-year-old linguistic styles don't put you off (they make it better honestly, it's like discussing Oscar Wilde's disastrous holiday with him) then this is definitely one to read; who doesn't enjoy a funny book after all?