Three Men In A Boat

The journey upstream of some impressionable young men into a mysterious challenging interior. An inevitable reckoning at the source. Finally the terrible return to reality. Here surely is pre-Edwardian English fiction at its classic finest. But this is not Heart of Darkness and the river is not the Congo. Actually its the Thames and the narrator is not Marlow but J or Jerome K Jerome. Published in 1889 10 years before Conrads novel Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) is one of the comic gems in the English language. An accidental one too. I did not intend to write a funny book at first said its author. Humour in literature is often not taken as seriously as it deserves. Nevertheless there are a few seriously funny books that remain great for all time. Three Men in a Boat is one of these. Ostensibly the tale of three city clerks on a boating trip an account that sometimes masquerades against its will as a travel guide Three Men in a Boat hovers somewhere between a shaggy-dog story and episodes of late-Victorian farce.