A lovely boating holiday
Dec. 28th, 2021 11:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodygranuaileThe 69th book I read in 2021 obviously had to be a comic novel. I went with Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat, which has been sitting obliviously on my Kindle since I read Connie Willis’ To Say Nothing of the Dog god knows how many years ago.
This classic travelogue concerns three young men of the nineteenth century–our narrator, J., and his friends George and Harris–and their dog, Montmorency, as they decide to take a two-week boating excursion up and down the Thames. Unsurprisingly for a comic novel, things go poorly and everyone makes fools of themselves. Three Men in a Boat is basically the 19th century predecessor to works like EuroTrip or the National Lampoon’s Vacation series.
There is not, per se, a plot; the trip in question is more of a structure to hang jokes upon, the structure in question being the length of the Thames. Many of the jokes don’t really have anything to do with the trip at all; our narrator continually digresses and goes on random tirades about everything from British history to additional stupid things that George, Harris, Montmorency, and himself had done at other times. The narrator’s main trait is his absolutely stunning lack of self-awareness, which works quite effectively to ensure the reader never feels too much sympathy for him and instead thoroughly enjoys his constant discomfort. (It is also the closest thing to a deep insight into the foibles of human nature that the book provides, although it might be giving it credit for more subtlety than it has to characterize it as “commentary” on the levels of lack-of-self-awareness that the human mind is capable of. It is just Jokes At J.’s Expense.)
The two biggest issues I had with the book are neither of them the author’s fault; one is simply that my cheap ebook version replaced what I assume were illustrations with odd little notations that served only to tease me that I was missing out on illustrations, and the other is that it has been just over 130 years since the book was written and I simply don’t know enough about the 1880’s English boating scene to follow half of what they’re talking about. I don’t even know much about the modern American boating scene; I’m not rich enough to be part of it.
At any rate, if you like laughing at self-absorbed Englishmen, this book should elicit many a sensible chuckle.
This classic travelogue concerns three young men of the nineteenth century–our narrator, J., and his friends George and Harris–and their dog, Montmorency, as they decide to take a two-week boating excursion up and down the Thames. Unsurprisingly for a comic novel, things go poorly and everyone makes fools of themselves. Three Men in a Boat is basically the 19th century predecessor to works like EuroTrip or the National Lampoon’s Vacation series.
There is not, per se, a plot; the trip in question is more of a structure to hang jokes upon, the structure in question being the length of the Thames. Many of the jokes don’t really have anything to do with the trip at all; our narrator continually digresses and goes on random tirades about everything from British history to additional stupid things that George, Harris, Montmorency, and himself had done at other times. The narrator’s main trait is his absolutely stunning lack of self-awareness, which works quite effectively to ensure the reader never feels too much sympathy for him and instead thoroughly enjoys his constant discomfort. (It is also the closest thing to a deep insight into the foibles of human nature that the book provides, although it might be giving it credit for more subtlety than it has to characterize it as “commentary” on the levels of lack-of-self-awareness that the human mind is capable of. It is just Jokes At J.’s Expense.)
The two biggest issues I had with the book are neither of them the author’s fault; one is simply that my cheap ebook version replaced what I assume were illustrations with odd little notations that served only to tease me that I was missing out on illustrations, and the other is that it has been just over 130 years since the book was written and I simply don’t know enough about the 1880’s English boating scene to follow half of what they’re talking about. I don’t even know much about the modern American boating scene; I’m not rich enough to be part of it.
At any rate, if you like laughing at self-absorbed Englishmen, this book should elicit many a sensible chuckle.