Three Men in a Boat & Three Men on the Bummel
As seen:
By Jerome K. Jerome, Dr Keith Carabine (University of Kent at Canterbury), and and, Professor Cedric Watts, M.A Ph.D. (Emeritus Proffessor of English, University of Sussex)
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1 review
Introduced and Annotated by Cedric Watts, M.A., Ph.D., Emeritus Professor of English, University of Sussex.
Three Men in a Boat is a comic classic. When it first appeared in 1889 it became a best seller, and has remained popular ever since. This motley novel has not only been translated into many languages but has also been staged, filmed, televised and imitated. The adventures and misfortunes on the Thames of the three English friends and their pugnacious dog, Montmorency, provide rich humour, shrewd observations, lyrical reflections, and, predominantly, genially ironic perceptions of human fallibility.
The sequel, Three Men on the Bummel, reunites the three friends for their ‘Bummel’ (‘roaming or wandering’) through Germany. The results vary from the seductively titillating to the outrageously farcical; and subsequent history has laden the narrative with ironies.
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At the time of the meeting only one person had read the entire book to the end.
We felt that it was a very confusing book with lots of long waffly sections that had little to do with the rest of the book. Sometimes these sections caused us confusion as we weren't entirely sure whether we were reading a bit from the past or a bit from the present time. We even had a disagreement during the meeting about what one bit of the book was about with regards whether it was a recollection or something to do with the boat journey.
Some elements of the book were really funny, especially the part about the hanging of the picture frame. We felt that we found the funny elements of the book far funnier when we were discussing them than when we were actually reading the book. Other elements left us feeling a little bit disturbed as they didn't seem to fit into the rest of the book as they were so maudlin.
Due to the lack of different characters we felt that if you didn't like the characters you were not going to enjoy this book very much as there is also not a great straight-forward storyline either. The characters that were in the book did seem to be much more boyish and childlike than their actual ages, in fact at times they were also very childish which we found annoying.
Overall we gave this book 4.5 out of 10.
