The Saturday Morning Post ( No. 70)

 

This week we have the sequel to Three Men on a Boat. It features the same characters as in that book, only maybe a decade later, as J and Harris are married and have children.

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below. 

Three Men on the Bummel by Jerome K Jerome  B-

The framework for this tale is a journey undertaken by Jerome and the two friends from Three Men in a Boat, George and Harris through Germany. They visit an number of German cities, and the Black Forest upon which Jerome makes some observations, or spins some humorous tale or two upon. He makes some observations about German society and its people, as they were in 1900. How accurate those observations are to day, is an open question.

I did find one observation telling. He was talking about the English tourist, who refuses to learn any other language. So in a foreign country, the tourist get what they want by spending money. The opportunity make money helping the English tourist drives foreign people to learn English. While this observation was somewhat tongue in cheek, I think there is some truth to it, as the English pretty much viewed everyone else as inferiors, and by and large attempted to adopt every country they owned to the English way. Indeed, India is the larges English speaking country in the world and today English is the lingua franca of the world.

The word "bummel" is a German word that Jerome only explains at the very end of the book, and can be considered journey that begins and ends at the same place and can take hours, days or weeks.

I enjoyed the book, with his dry humor and witty observations, a little less than Three Men on a Boat. It is, however, not a novel in any real sense, with no plot to speak of. Nor is it a travel book since most of the destinations are given little or no general observations, though some are used to describe certain aspects of German society. I enjoyed my time on my bummel, but having said that, I guess I've said it all.