Three Men in a Boat

Convinced that they are all overworked and in urgent need of rest, three young men of the London clerking class — the narrator, J., his friends George and Harris, and Montmorency, a fox terrier of immense self-importance — resolve on a fortnight's rowing holiday up the Thames, from Kingston to Oxford. They will sleep under canvas, do their own cooking, and commune with Nature. What could possibly go wrong?

Almost everything, gloriously. Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat (1889) began life as a sober travelogue of the river and turned, almost against its author's will, into one of the funniest books in the English language. Its pleasures lie not in any plot — there is barely one — but in the company and the catastrophes: the packing of the hamper, the battle with a tin of pineapple, the smell of cheese carried up to London, and the immortal saga of Uncle Podger hanging a picture and bringing a whole household to ruin.

Holding it all together is J.'s serene, deadpan voice, recounting every disaster with the dignity of a reasonable man surrounded by fools — and the comic digressions that keep swallowing the page, each anecdote funnier than the thing that prompted it. Between the laughter run sudden passages of real beauty: the river at evening, the night sounds on the water, the quiet love of the Thames that Jerome never quite stopped writing.

Tender, ridiculous, and endlessly quotable, Three Men in a Boat stands near the head of the great tradition of English comic prose that runs on to The Diary of a Nobody and P. G. Wodehouse. More than a hundred years on, it is as fresh and as funny as the morning the three men pushed off from the bank.