Question

Narrate the story of stivvings of novel three men in a boat

Answer 1

n ancient river. 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, it's the Thames, and the narrator is not Marlow but J, or Jerome, K Jerome. Published in 1889, 10 years before Conrad's 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.

What's it all about? Jerome K Jerome would probably say his masterpiece was "about one hundred and fifty pages", but I would argue that Three Men in a Boat is about the cameraderie of youth, the absurdity of existence, camping holidays, playing truant, comic songs, and the sweet memories of lost time. You could also read it as an unconscious elegy for imperial Britain. Did I omit to say that it also features a dog named Montmorency? In short, like all the finest comic writing, it's about everything and nothing.

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Jerome K Jerome is more or less forgotten now. He was a jobbing freelance literary journalist who had just got married and needed to provide for his wife and family. Encouraged by his new wife, Georgina, Jerome intended his account of a boating holiday to be a popular travel guide for a booming market. In late-Victorian England there was a vogue for recreational boating on the Thames between Kingston and Oxford. This was the golden age of the Henley regatta. Rowing boats, steam launches, even the occasional gondola: in the Season, up to 800 vessels a day passed through Boulter's Lock near Maidenhead. Here was an audience for a new river guide. In fact, Jerome's descriptions of Hampton Court, Marlow and Medmenham are all that survive from the original plan for a travel book.

But something funny happened on the way to publication, perhaps because it was first serialised in a magazine. Jerome's discursive comic voice took over. The river journey he makes with his friends George and Harris (and Montmorency) becomes the narrative line on which he hangs a sequence of comic anecdotes loosely associated with the journey upriver.

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Jerome's themes are airily inconsequential and supremely English – boats, fishing, the weather, the atrocities of English food and the vicissitudes of suburban life – perfectly pitched in a light comic prose whose influence can be detected later in the work of, among many, PG Wodehouse, James Thurber, and Nick Hornby. My favourite Jerome set piece is the episode with the tinned pineapple.

The three mariners have had a long, hard day on the river. They reach their evening mooring, dog-tired and ravenously hungry. When George unearths a tin of pineapple chunks "we felt" writes Jerome, "that life was worth living after all". They were, he says, all of them exceedingly fond of pineapple. As the anticipation begins to build, he delivers the most perfect sentence in a book already buoyant with light comedy. "We looked at the picture on the tin," writes Jerome; "we thought of the juice."

Then they discover that they have no tin-opener. What follows is a passage of comic genius spun from nothing more – or less – than the banality of everyday life. Read it. This passage ("a fearful battle") comes as the brilliant climax to chapter 12.

Three Men in a Boat is one of those rare classics that seems to come, as it were, out of nowhere, and to defy the odds. Jerome K Jerome later wrote a hit West End play, The Passing of the Third Floor Back, but he never recaptured the mood of careless comic joy that aerates the pages of his immortal masterpiece.