Three Men in a Boat—To Say Nothing of the Dog

Felt rather meh by this book, didn't get the humor and didn't enjoy it that much. Maybe something I would get back to in a later date to see if I'd change my mind but for now I was underwhelmed by the story.

The funniest book of all time. That is all.

It's like listening to your slightly inebriated uncle at Thanksgiving bloviating about his youth and acumen. Everyone nods along, all the while smiling to themselves at how exaggerated his stories are.

At it's core, the story is straight forward; 3 guys decide to take a boat and row up river for a week or so. One of them brings his dog. The narrator, J, goes on tangents like he's the personification of a word association game. He's constantly "reminded" of a story and digresses as he's recounting the river trip:

- That's Harris all over - so ready to take the burden of everything himself, and put it on the backs of other people. He always reminds me of my poor Uncle Podger.....

- Speaking of oak staircases reminds me that there is a magnificent carved oak staircase in one of the houses in Kingston. It is a shop now....

- Speaking of comic songs and parties, reminds me of a rather curious incident at which I once assisted; which, as it throws much light upon the inner mental working of human nature in general, ought, I think, to be recorded in these pages.

- Talking of locks reminds me of an accident George and I very nearly had one summer's morning at Hampton Court...

The stories are always well told and usually funny (probably funnier if you know the areas he's referring to, which I don't), but often times relatable. For instance, trying to neatly roll up a rope or cord:

- There is something very strange and unaccountable about a tow-line. You roll it up with as much patience and care as you would take to fold up a new pair of trousers, and five minutes afterwards, when you pick it up, it is one ghastly, soul-revolting tangle....

Whoever rolls it up swears they did it perfectly, and blames the person unraveling it. While the person unraveling claims the person who rolled it up is a horse's ass:

"What have you been trying to do with it, make a fishing-net of it? You've made a nice mess you have; why couldn't you wind it up properly, you silly dummy?" he grunts from time to time as he struggles wildly with it, and lays it out flat on the tow-path, and runs round and round it, trying to find the end.

On the other hand, the man who wound it up thinks the whole cause of the muddle rests with the man who is trying to unwind it.

"It was all right when you took it!" he exclaims indignantly. "Why don't you think what you are doing? You go about things in such a slap-dash style. You'd get a scaffolding pole entangled you would!"

And they feel so angry with one another that they would like to hang each other with the thing.

However, it does get a bit old. I'd recommend reading this in spurts, when you need a laugh or break from your other reads. After all, how much of a braggart can you listen to before you get fed up? Again, J is more endearing than annoying, but still.

In between all this is some beautiful prose.

- As we drew nearer, we could see that the three men fishing seemed old and solemn-looking men. They sat on three chairs in the punt, and watched intently their lines. And the red sunset threw a mystic light upon the waters, and tinged with fire the towering woods, and made a golden glory of the piled-up clouds. It was an hour of deep enchantment, of ecstatic hope and longing. The little sail stood out against the purple sky, the gloaming lay around us, wrapping the world in rainbow shadows; and, behind us, crept the night.

or

- It was a glorious night. The moon had sunk, and left the quiet earth alone with the stars. It seemed as if, in the silence and the hush, while we her children slept, they were talking with her, their sister - conversing of mighty mysteries in voices too vast and deep for childish human ears to catch the sound. They awe us, these strange stars, so cold, so clear. We are as children whose small feet have strayed into some dim-lit temple of the god they have been taught to worship but know not; and, standing where the echoing dome spans the long vista of the shadowy light, glance up, half hoping, half afraid to see some awful vision hovering there.

All in all, it's a good read. I'd just piecemeal it, rather than gorging yourself in a single go.

A funny and classic that is light entertainment at its best.

I agreed with George, and suggested that we should seek out some retired and old-world spot, far from the madding crowd, and dream away a sunny week among its drowsy lanes—some half-forgotten nook, hidden away by the fairies, out of reach of the noisy world—some quaint-perched eyrie on the cliffs of Time, from whence the surging waves of the nineteenth century would sound far-off and faint.

Three Men on a Boat is a cozy, whimsical, gently comedic and altogether charming little novel that was a complete delight to read. This is almost entirely thanks to the strong voice of our first-person narrator, “J.”, a fictionalized version of the author himself, which is one of the most unique and entertaining voices I’ve come across. (I have to mention that the cover of the edition I own happens to capture the tone and feel of the novel perfectly.)

The plot, insofar as there is one, revolves around the three aforementioned men in a boat during a two-week excursion on the Thames. In reality, this is primarily a framing device for what turns out to be a series of humorous vignettes and anecdotes strung together. Sometimes these recount the escapades of our bumbling heroes as they boat up the river, but more often than not they are the narrator reminiscing on prior shenanigans that J. and/or his friends were involved in, or imagining various historical events connected to landmarks they pass, or going off on flights of fancy about comedic hypotheticals that come to mind (often in second person), or waxing poetic on the landscape or mankind or the modern age with (what must be deliberately) purple and overly sentimental prose. There are a few dialogues (like one between a dog and cat) that are written in the form of a play. Altogether, it’s a bit of stand-up comedy mixed with a travel guide mixed with melodramatic nature writing and introspection. Hilarity ensues.

There’s also quite a bit of satire for one willing to look deeper (but one of the delightful, funny ones, not the miserable, mean kind). Presumably Jerome is taking good-humored jabs at travelogues, histories, and much, much more, but I’m not familiar enough with the tropes of the period to pick up on most of it. What I did notice was mainly pertaining to satire of the novel itself: our narrator makes several references to the structure of a novel and stereotypical heroines “of the three-volume novel.” I also think that this is the motivation for the one moment that felt a bit out of place,

their discovery of the dead woman’s corpse as they row past

. She is given a melodramatic backstory that I suppose is supposed to be a critique of sensational novels and the like, but it is a bit jarring given that everything else in the novel is lighthearted and frivolous.

In fact, that frivolity is a huge part of the charm.

Three Men in a Boat takes place in a simple world where forgetting the jar of mustard, which our narrator typically does not care for, is the worst crisis imaginable:

We tackled the cold beef for lunch, and then we found that we had forgotten to bring any mustard. I don’t think I ever in my life, before or since, felt I wanted mustard as badly as I felt I wanted it then. I don’t care for mustard as a rule, and it is very seldom that I take it at all, but I would have given worlds for it then. I don’t know how many worlds there may be in the universe, but anyone who had brought me a spoonful of mustard at that precise moment could have had them all. I grow reckless like that when I want a thing and can’t get it. […] It cast a gloom over the boat, there being no mustard. We ate our beef in silence. Existence seemed hollow and uninteresting. We thought of the happy days of childhood, and sighed.

The three men (all a bit foppish) are often completely oblivious and obtuse, overdramatic, and altogether incompetent, constantly getting on one another’s nerves but remaining fundamentally good-natured and earnest throughout. J. may completely lack self-awareness, but Jerome does not.

Yet underscoring it all are some very real anxieties of the age. The Victorian period was a time of great scientific advancement and rapid social changes, and those come through in the novel. Many of them remain relevant today, such as J.’s concern that people no longer slow down and enjoy the simple things in life but are caught in “that fretful haste, that vehement striving, that is every day becoming more and more the bane of nineteenth-century life.”

I very much look forward to reading more of Jerome’s mishaps and misadventures in the sequel,

Three Men on the Bummel!

Some favorite quotes:

The chief beauty of this book 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—especially George, who weighs about twelve stone.

With me, it was my liver that was out of order. I knew it was my liver that was out of order, because I had just been reading a patent liver-pill circular, in which were detailed the various symptoms by which a man could tell when his liver was out of order. I had them all. It is a most extraordinary thing, but I never read a patent medicine advertisement without being impelled to the conclusion that I am suffering from the particular disease therein dealt with in its most virulent form. The diagnosis seems in every case to correspond exactly with all the sensations that I have ever felt. […] George fancies he is ill; but there’s never anything really the matter with him, you know.

Slowly the golden memory of the dead sun fades from the hearts of the cold, sad clouds. Silent, like sorrowing children, the birds have ceased their song, and only the moorhen’s plaintive cry and the harsh croak of the corncrake stirs the awed hush around the couch of waters, where the dying day breathes out her last. From the dim woods on either bank, Night’s ghostly army, the grey shadows, creep out with noiseless tread to chase away the lingering rearguard of the light, and pass, with noiseless, unseen feet, above the waving river-grass, and through the sighing rushes; and Night, upon her sombre throne, folds her black wings above the darkening world, and, from her phantom palace, lit by the pale stars, reigns in stillness.

“Now for breakfast we shall want a frying-pan”—(Harris said it was indigestible; but we merely urged him not to be an ass, and George went on)—“a teapot and a kettle, and a methylated spirit stove.”

Now, I’m not like that. I can’t sit still and see another man slaving and working. I want to get up and superintend, and walk round with my hands in my pockets, and tell him what to do. It is my energetic nature. I can’t help it.

He came and sat down on things, just when they were wanted to be packed; and he laboured under the fixed belief that, whenever Harris or George reached out their hand for anything, it was his cold, damp nose that they wanted. He put his leg into the jam, and he worried the teaspoons, and he pretended that the lemons were rats, and got into the hamper and killed three of them before Harris could land him with the frying-pan. Harris said I encouraged him. I didn’t encourage him. A dog like that don’t want any encouragement. It’s the natural, original sin that is born in him that makes him do things like that.

“But, great Caesar! man,” expostulated my friend; “you don’t mean to say you have covered over carved oak with blue wallpaper?” “Yes,” was the reply: “it was expensive work. Had to matchboard it all over first, of course. But the room looks cheerful now. It was awful gloomy before.” I can’t say I altogether blame the man (which is doubtless a great relief to his mind).

To go back to the carved-oak question, they must have had very fair notions of the artistic and the beautiful, our great-great-grandfathers. Why, all our art treasures of today are only the dug-up commonplaces of three or four hundred years ago. I wonder if there is real intrinsic beauty in the old soup-plates, beer-mugs, and candle-snuffers that we prize so now, or if it is only the halo of age glowing around them that gives them their charms in our eyes. The “old blue” that we hang about our walls as ornaments were the common everyday household utensils of a few centuries ago; and the pink shepherds and the yellow shepherdesses that we hand round now for all our friends to gush over, and pretend they understand, were the unvalued mantel-ornaments that the mother of the eighteenth century would have given the baby to suck when he cried. Will it be the same in the future? Will the prized treasures of today always be the cheap trifles of the day before? Will rows of our willow-pattern dinner-plates be ranged above the chimneypieces of the great in the years 2000 and odd?

We, in this age, do not see the beauty of that dog. We are too familiar with it. It is like the sunset and the stars: we are not awed by their loveliness because they are common to our eyes. So it is with that china dog. In 2288 people will gush over it. The making of such dogs will have become a lost art. Our descendants will wonder how we did it, and say how clever we were. We shall be referred to lovingly as “those grand old artists that flourished in the nineteenth century, and produced those china dogs.”

We are but the veriest, sorriest slaves of our stomach. Reach not after morality and righteousness, my friends; watch vigilantly your stomach, and diet it with care and judgment. Then virtue and contentment will come and reign within your heart, unsought by any effort of your own; and you will be a good citizen, a loving husband, and a tender father—a noble, pious man.

It was a glorious night. The moon had sunk, and left the quiet earth alone with the stars. It seemed as if, in the silence and the hush, while we her children slept, they were talking with her, their sister—conversing of mighty mysteries in voices too vast and deep for childish human ears to catch the sound. They awe us, these strange stars, so cold, so clear. We are as children whose small feet have strayed into some dim-lit temple of the god they have been taught to worship but know not; and, standing where the echoing dome spans the long vista of the shadowy light, glance up, half hoping, half afraid to see some awful vision hovering there. And yet it seems so full of comfort and of strength, the night. In its great presence, our small sorrows creep away, ashamed. The day has been so full of fret and care, and our hearts have been so full of evil and of bitter thoughts, and the world has seemed so hard and wrong to us. Then Night, like some great loving mother, gently lays her hand upon our fevered head, and turns our little tear-stained faces up to hers, and smiles; and, though she does not speak, we know what she would say, and lay our hot flushed cheek against her bosom, and the pain is gone. Sometimes, our pain is very deep and real, and we stand before her very silent, because there is no language for our pain, only a moan. Night’s heart is full of pity for us: she cannot ease our aching; she takes our hand in hers, and the little world grows very small and very far away beneath us, and, borne on her dark wings, we pass for a moment into a mightier Presence than her own, and in the wondrous light of that great Presence, all human life lies like a book before us, and we know that Pain and Sorrow are but the angels of God. Only those who have worn the crown of suffering can look upon that wondrous light; and they, when they return, may not speak of it, or tell the mystery they know.

The only subject on which Montmorency and I have any serious difference of opinion is cats. I like cats; Montmorency does not. When I meet a cat, I say, “Poor Pussy!” and stop down and tickle the side of its head; and the cat sticks up its tail in a rigid, cast-iron manner, arches its back, and wipes its nose up against my trousers; and all is gentleness and peace. When Montmorency meets a cat, the whole street knows about it; and there is enough bad language wasted in ten seconds to last an ordinarily respectable man all his life, with care.

so we got ten pounds of potatoes, a bushel of peas, and a few cabbages. We got a beefsteak pie, a couple of gooseberry tarts, and a leg of mutton from the hotel; and fruit, and cakes, and bread and butter, and jam, and bacon and eggs, and other things we foraged round about the town for.

It was a great success, that Irish stew. I don’t think I ever enjoyed a meal more. There was something so fresh and piquant about it. One’s palate gets so tired of the old hackneyed things: here was a dish with a new flavour, with a taste like nothing else on earth. And it was nourishing, too. As George said, there was good stuff in it. The peas and potatoes might have been a bit softer, but we all had good teeth, so that did not matter much: and as for the gravy, it was a poem—a little too rich, perhaps, for a weak stomach, but nutritious.

Just when we had given up all hope—yes, I know that is always the time that things do happen in novels and tales; but I can’t help it. I resolved, when I began to write this book, that I would be strictly truthful in all things; and so I will be, even if I have to employ hackneyed phrases for the purpose. It was just when we had given up all hope, and I must therefore say so.

Then we cleaned up, and put everything straight (a continual labour, which was beginning to afford me a pretty clear insight into a question that had often posed me—namely, how a woman with the work of only one house on her hands manages to pass away her time), and, at about ten, set out on what we had determined should be a good day’s journey.

It always does seem to me that I am doing more work than I should do. It is not that I object to the work, mind you; I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours. I love to keep it by me: the idea of getting rid of it nearly breaks my heart. You cannot give me too much work; to accumulate work has almost become a passion with me:

We did not come out well in that photograph, George and I. Of course, as was to be expected, our luck ordained it, that the man should set his wretched machine in motion at the precise moment that we were both lying on our backs with a wild expression of “Where am I? and what is it?” on our faces, and our four feet waving madly in the air. Our feet were undoubtedly the leading article in that photograph. Indeed, very little else was to be seen. They filled up the foreground entirely. Behind them, you caught glimpses of the other boats, and bits of the surrounding scenery; but everything and everybody else in the lock looked so utterly insignificant and paltry compared with our feet, that all the other people felt quite ashamed of themselves, and refused to subscribe to the picture.

It would not be a good place for the heroine of a modern novel to stay at. The heroine of a modern novel is always “divinely tall,” and she is ever “drawing herself up to her full height.” At the Barley Mow she would bump her head against the ceiling each time she did this.

The river—with the sunlight flashing from its dancing wavelets, gilding gold the grey-green beech-trunks, glinting through the dark, cool wood paths, chasing shadows o’er the shallows, flinging diamonds from the mill-wheels, throwing kisses to the lilies, wantoning with the weirs’ white waters, silvering moss-grown walls and bridges, brightening every tiny townlet, making sweet each lane and meadow, lying tangled in the rushes, peeping, laughing, from each inlet, gleaming gay on many a far sail, making soft the air with glory—is a golden fairy stream. But the river—chill and weary, with the ceaseless raindrops falling on its brown and sluggish waters, with a sound as of a woman, weeping low in some dark chamber; while the woods, all dark and silent, shrouded in their mists of vapour, stand like ghosts upon the margin; silent ghosts with eyes reproachful, like the ghosts of evil actions, like the ghosts of friends neglected—is a spirit-haunted water through the land of vain regrets.

“With a little supper at the ———

2 to follow,” I added, half unconsciously.

2

A capital little out-of-the-way restaurant, in the neighbourhood of ———, where you can get one of the best-cooked and cheapest little French dinners or suppers that I know of, with an excellent bottle of Beaune, for three-and-six; and which I am not going to be idiot enough to advertise.