An all-time classic (Three Men in a Boat - Jerome K. Jerome)

Member Name: CaptainD

Product:	Three Men in a Boat - Jerome K. Jerome
Date:	23/04/05 (1225 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Absolutely brilliant study of human nature, very funny, wonderful descriptions of the Thames area

Disadvantages: Er... er... er... er... er... nope, can't find any.

I’m sure you’ll already have heard of Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome. I’m sure you’ll have also heard how brilliant it is. Well, if you haven’t, let me tell you. If you have, let me tell you anyway.

The narrator is a medical curiosity – when he reads the medical dictionary, he finds that he has every condition ever diagnosed – with perhaps the exception of housemaid’s knee… Along with his two friends George and William (and Montmorency, the dog), and realising that men such as they need a holiday to cope with the stresses and strains of doing nothing every day, they plan a cruise down the Thames. No sooner is that decided, of course, than they all start to argue about how, when, etc. But eventually they’re off on an adventure that promises to pull them all together in an at-each-others’-throats kind of way. (Except Montmorency.)

I guess part of the reason I like this book is because the setting is in and around the Thames area, where I lived for most of my life, so the area is very familiar to me. Another reason is the characters – particularly the narrator, who is completely psychosomatic but believes that George continually puts on being ill. But it’s really the interplay between the characters that makes it such a wonderful book – they’re all so human, and the foibles they show will be instantly familiar to everyone, whether they can see the traits in themselves or in their friends and family. Jerome brilliantly observes the way humans behave (and misbehave), and the characters are totally believable even though they’re sometimes grotesquely caricaturised. The constant arguments, tantrums, sulks, etc are all there but the three men in the boat’s friendship still wins through in the end. There’s really not a great deal of plot in this book but that’s because it doesn’t need it.

The descriptions of the English countryside along the banks of the Thames are also beautifully described and the three’s attempts at map-reading sound all to familiar to someone like me who’s no good at directions! (Their efforts at boating itself aren’t a great deal more successful, either…) Appropriately, the story moves along just like a boat drifting along a river – you don’t really notice that it’s going anywhere, but it gets there in the end anyway. The pace is unhurried and the whole book has a “gentle” feel to it, reminding the reader of the rather less stressful time in which the book is set. The grammar and language used is also rather old-fashioned, but unless you have a particular hatred for older styles of writing then it won’t trouble you. (Personally I love some writers whose writing is not what you’d call modern – Mary Shelly and Jonathon Swift, for example – while some I just can’t get into at all – Daniel Defoe and Joseph Conrad are just too wordy for my tastes – so you know where I’m coming from with that comment about the grammatical style.)

The preface to the first edition states: ”The chief beauty of this books lies not so much in its literary style, or in the extent and usefulness of the information it conveys, as in its simple truthfulness. Its pages form the record of events that really happened. All that has been done is to colour them ; and, for this, no extra charge has been made. George and Harris and Montmorency are not poetic ideals, but things of flesh and blood…” - and that really sums it up pretty well. You won’t find yourself rolling about on the floor laughing, but you’ll keep a smile on your face the whole way through and have a quiet chuckle now and again because you can relate to it. I can relate to it a little more as I know the locations they visit so well, but I don’t think it really makes a lot of difference.

Overall this is a classic and always will be because, no matter what new technological thingamajigs mankind invents, human nature will always be the same – and there’s never been a better study of it in a work of fiction than this. Recommended 400%.

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