Decorative hardcover with insert

Vad som skulle bli en vanlig reseguide blev en av världens roligaste romaner. Jerome K. Jeromes Tre män i en båt utspelar sig under två veckor längs med floden Themsen, från Kingston upon Thames i London, till Oxford och tillbaka. Berättelserna om de viktiga historiska platserna förlöses i en hejdlös komik, när J. och hans vänner, George och Carl, och J:s (påhittade) hund, Montmorency, ger sig ut på båtsemester.

Three men go on a river journey. In a boat. Hilarity supposedly ensues.
Apparently this is not the kind of humor I appreciate. I saw what he was trying to do and how he was trying to be funny, but it just came over as tedious and dull for me. *shrug* ( )

Still funny today. ( )

This isn’t as much a straight-up sequel to Three Men in a Boat as it is an excuse for Jerome to tear into a whole new range of satirical topics—but it still a sequel. It features the same characters, about ten years later, on another misguided but ultimately benign bout of tourism, and with about the same level of self-awareness as before.

Less of the book takes place in Germany than I’d thought going in, and there Jerome focuses on “highlights” like the dog chasing a pig around a restaurant or the habit of German carters to fall asleep at the reins, rather than the day-to-day. Most of the rest of the book’s about the trio planning the trip and setting off, with digressions into other unfortunate past travel adventures, explanations for why things must be done a particular way, and generally exaggerating social foibles and expectations to poke fun at them. My favourite of these was probably the passage about how nobody is bike ads ever seems to be putting in any effort and how they were sexualized even then. My least favourite was probably the continued harping about how rule-abiding the Germans are, and how they’ll fine you for everything.

But it’s still a fun story with much the same silliness and spirit of Three Men in a Boat, though. A lot of the humour’s still funny and relatable—running for public transit, language education that fails utterly, that guy who absolutely knows how to fix your vehicle but actually doesn’t—though there are bits that haven’t aged well. For some reason Jerome throws in a passage with a Black stereotype, he seems really into informing us how fat the Germans are, and some of his comments probably sounded great before the two World Wars. That sort of thing.

But all in all, it’s an amusing book and a decent sequel, but it’s not a must-read. I definitely got a sense reading this that if it had been written today, it would’ve been somebody’s stand-up routine rather than a novel, and maybe that’s all you need to know, to know if you’ll like it.

To bear in mind: May offend some Germans. May offend some English people. Almost certainly will offend fat people. Contains an exceptionally outdated word for Black people, and some parody dialogue for both Black and Scottish people, spelled-out dialect and all. (The Black one is notably worse, because of course it is.)

7/10 ( )