Amusing piffle about Brits at leisure (late 19th-cent.). I think Three Men on the Bummel is even better than the earlier and more famous Three Men in a Boat (to say nothing of the dog), but then I really loved the sections where the (English) men were practicing the (insulting/unlikely) English phrases from an English-German phrasebook on English shopkeepers (prior to learning the German phrases), and where one guy working on his bicycle kept getting endless advice from "helpful" passers-by.. May seem a bit slow to some. ( )

Three Men in a Boat was recommended to me by Janet, almost inadvertently, since something I'd writted reminded me of the first chapter. Having read that online I enjoyed it so much I went to buy the book, and found this edition which also contains the later Three Men on a Bummel.

I have to say I found the former book definitely out-weighs the latter in terms of overall quality, not to mention being rather less prone to the sort of casual comments about people from other countries which these days feel slightly uncomfortable. Both books are very witty, although perhaps a little too much of it is poking fun at our ability to see others flaws but not our own. They're very light-hearted though, and both give lovely pictures of their environment as well as a number of amusing boating or cycling anecdotes.

Recommended. ( )

Hilarious ( )

Three Men in a Boat (1889) came highly recommended from a number of "must read" type lists and so I had pretty high expectations which is always a bad start to a book. It's a comedy novel about 3 men who travel by small boat up the Thames River, based in part on a real trip Jerome had taken, but largely invented while sitting at a desk soon after his marriage at the prodding of his wife. It's sort of a satire of inland small boat traveling for pleasure first made popular by John MacGregor's A Thousand Miles in the Rob Roy Canoe on Rivers and Lakes of Europe (1866) that by the 1880s had become all the rage. Another more famous example is Robert Louis Stevenson's An Inland Voyage (1878) - all of which can be seen as part of the increased leisure time among the middle class due to the industrial revolution and rising living standards resulting in more travel in particular in the outdoors. However those books are not comedy and Jerome uses the river travelogue/travelguide mostly as a stage onto which he casts his actors in a comedy of manners and British self-deprecation. It's one of the more overtly funny things I've read from the 19th century, although that doesn't include much. Since it involves so much in your face joking and physical slapstick, like Chaplin or The Three Stooges, it has aged well because matters of the body are timeless - some of the oldest recorded jokes in the world involve farting, which is not to say the book stinks. Rather it is an insight into the time, a look into manners and mannerisms of the late 19th century with an impishly boyish perspective.

--Review by Stephen Balbach, via CoolReading (c) 2008 cc-by-nd ( )