Three Men in a Boat

Three Men in a Boat is a comic novel by Jerome K. Jerome, published in 1889. It started life as a serious travel guide to the Thames and ended up as one of the funniest books in English, mostly because Jerome could not stop telling jokes long enough to write the geography. The original publisher kept asking him to put in more useful information about lock fees and riverside inns, and Jerome kept producing more stories about his friends and their dog instead.

The three men of the title are J, the narrator, and his real life friends George and Harris, plus the fox terrier Montmorency. They decide that they are all overworked and need a holiday. After much consideration of European resorts, they settle on a two week boating trip up the Thames from Kingston to Oxford. The rest of the book is the trip. They get lost in the Hampton Court maze. They struggle with a tin of pineapple they cannot open. They put up a tent in the rain. Harris tries to sing comic songs and forgets the words. George falls in the river. Montmorency picks fights with cats much larger than himself.

What keeps the book in print after more than a century is the timing of the comedy. Jerome had a gift for the long set up that pays off in a single sharp sentence, and he was unusually willing to make himself look foolish. The famous chapter on uncle Podger trying to hang a picture is the kind of writing that gets quoted by people who have not read the book in years. There are also passages of straight description, particularly of summer evenings on the river, that are oddly beautiful and that show why Jerome considered himself a serious writer even when he was making everyone laugh.

The sequel, Three Men on the Bummel, came out in 1900 and follows the same three men on a cycling tour in Germany. It is not quite as good but is still very funny. For new readers Three Men in a Boat is the place to start. It works on its own and is one of those rare comic books that has not gone stale at all.