How well does humor age? Can a comedic travelogue more than 13 decades old still hold up, by today’s standards? We faced those questions when someone recommended this book—way out of left field—for our 2019 Siblings’ Book Club. Skeptical to say the least, we were surprised to see Three Men in a Boat voted into our top-ten, and the short answer to our initial queries was, “No…it doesn’t really hold up,” though explaining why might be difficult.
This book follows three friends (“to say nothing of the dog”) as they spend a holiday paddling up an English river and camping along the way. From the outset, their personalities are flamboyantly unique, and while all seem fairly excited for the camping excursion, none of them really seem prepared. Or capable.
Author Jerome K. Jerome lays the humor on thick, and in all honesty, most of us readers were laughing out loud at some of the scenes early on. Specifically, I found great mirth in his description of Uncle Podger who believed he could fix anything, but who actually needed the help of every family member and neighbor just to hammer a nail into a beam in his dining room.
“Aunt Maria would mildly observe that, next time Uncle Podger was going to hammer a nail into the wall, she hoped he’d let her know in time, so that she could make arrangements to go and spend a week with her mother while it was being done” (Kindle Loc. 325).
Scenes like this pop up so sporadically in this book—and many of them are quite funny—that you think the whole book will be an enjoyable romp of funny stories and insights. The further you go, however, the more annoying the stories become!
It’s not like the river journey is so exciting that you can’t wait to get back to it, but a travelogue about three men in a boat sort of promises to inform us a bit about their trip. Instead, the further you read, the more it becomes a mishmash of weird (and often, very dated) anecdotes about places I’ve never been or situations that are foreign to me, stories that have no correlation with the plot, the characters, or the general interest of the reader. Ultimately, the book turns into a 130-year-old volume of Reader’s Digest, and I don’t know anyone who reads even the newest editions (if they’re still in print) cover-to-cover.
While I finished a good 60 percent of the book, I just couldn’t take much more of it. Therefore I also can’t rightly recommend something I myself didn’t want to complete! Still, this story contains many a great line, so if anyone ever edits the book down to modern tastes, I’d be interested in reading a distilled version. I close this review with a few of those great lines:
[The dog] Montmorency’s ambition in life, is to get in the way and be sworn at. If he can squirm in anywhere where he particularly is not wanted, and be a perfect nuisance, and make people mad, and have things thrown at his head, then he feels his day has not been wasted. (Kindle Loc. 55)
It seems to be the rule of this world. Each person has what he doesn’t want, and other people have what he does want. Married men have wives, and don’t seem to want them; and young single fellows cry out that they can’t get them. Poor people who can hardly keep themselves have eight hearty children. Rich old couples, with no one to leave their money to, die childless. (Kindle Loc. 758)
As they worked, they cursed us—not with a common cursory curse, but with long, carefully-thought-out, comprehensive curses, that embraced the whole of our career, and went away into the distant future, and included all our relations, and covered everything connected with us—good, substantial curses. (Kindle Loc. 1860)
©2020 E.T.