This is my second read of Three Men in a Boat. The review I wrote a few years ago follows this article. But first, we have my more recent musings, which ended up not really being a review at all. It’s more me peering into the depths that lie beneath the surface of this collection of jolly reminiscences and reflections on Thames leisure boating. It’s Martin’s companion to Three Men in a Boat, if you will, though I am perhaps more of a stowaway than an invited guest. The article that follows is quite long and meandering and probably only of potential interest to those who have read the book, rather than to those who are thinking of reading it.

So if you are amenable to a longish trip where you might have to do some rowing, off we go.

Harris, George, and narrator J, three young men with middling jobs and lives in nineteenth century London, decide to take a trip on the Thames. They think this will be good for their health. The journey starts at Kingston, former place of crowning for Anglo Saxon kings, the centre of the kingdom in effect. The focus has since left Kingston, but an important royal palace remains close by – Hampton Court.

Harris recounts his experience in the Hampton Court maze, a journey where the main aim is not really to get to the centre. I mean that’s part of it, but once you get there, the next challenge is to get out again. Reaching the centre repeatedly, as Harris ends up doing, is not the definition of success. And just before Harris’s maze memories, we have J reflecting on the fact that people always want what they don’t have – girls who are alone desperately wanting boyfriends, and girls with boyfriends wanting rid of them, for example. The girls go in to something they want to get out of again.

Against this contradictory backdrop, J and Harris set out on a journey where there is really only one way you can go – along the course of the river, to their destination in Oxford. We will soon find things are not that simple.

No sooner has the journey started than it seems to flirt with endings. Harris wants to go and see significant tombs. Tourists seem to like visiting tombs, but not J, who seeks to avoid such morbid interests. He drags Harris away from his graveyards, so that the journey can continue towards Weybridge where J and Harris will pick up George, and complete their group of three. We’re almost halfway through the book by this time, a point marked by confusion. George is given a towline, with the aim of walking along the river path pulling the boat behind him, providing a rest from rowing. The towline gets hopelessly tangled. J tells stories of two men so intent on untangling a towline that their boat drifts off, and of a couple so engrossed in talking to each other that they have no idea their towline came loose from the boat they were apparently pulling, many hours before. But even if these stories of towing all end in failure, does the fact of a boat not reaching its destination really represent failure? After all, we have already had an example of undesirable endings in the graves Harris wanted to visit. Maybe in that context, not reaching the destination is no bad thing.

We get to the end of the first day, which comes to a rather painful conclusion as the three elect to push on a few extra miles before dark and regret their decision, achieving nothing beyond wearing themselves out. In their tired state, a mile feels much further than a mile. Making tea on the first night, advice is given not to watch the kettle boil, otherwise it never will. Focusing too much on your destination is a mistake. You will get there more surely if you forget counting the miles, which somehow lengthen in the counting of them.

During the night J finds it hard to sleep. A bed in a rowing boat is not a restful place. He gets up, stands on the riverbank and looks up at starry skies. Ironically, in standing sleepless under the stars, he feels peaceful.

The journey then follows a sequence of events where the mundane and the significant travel together. Passing Magna Carta Island, J reflects on great moments in history, before recounting the history of his efforts to get into a tin of pineapples without a tin opener. When the wind starts blowing in the right direction, the crew raise a sail, which has the boat flying along with the breeze, part of the glories of nature, before crashing down to Earth again in the form of a collision with fishermen. The three making this journey are a trio of ordinary men, and yet the number three has quiet parallels with the divine trinities that appear repeatedly in various religions. And the fishermen they crash into have religious connotations too, as in fishermen on the Sea of Galilee, recruited to be fishers of men.

After having trouble with steam launches, the three stop at Wargrave, near the George and Dragon pub. The pub sign shows the battle with the dragon on one side, George having a pint on the other side after the work is done. Heroic George becomes ordinary again after his battle. Meanwhile, at Henley, non-heroic Thames tourist George tries to play the banjo he has brought along on the trip. Being a beginner, no one is impressed with his efforts. We also get reminiscences about the chaotic early rowing efforts of J and George. They both might aspire to banjo playing and rowing greatness, maybe even to becoming a hero like that famous George who fought the dragon. And yet we have already seen heroic George having his pint like an ordinary man. This makes you wonder if hero George’s situation is really any different to that of tourist George, who can’t play the banjo let alone fight dragons. J chooses this moment to comment on the nature of achievement with reference to an experienced boatman:

There is something so beautifully calm and restful about his method. It is so free from that fretful haste, that vehement striving, that is every day becoming more and more the bane of the nineteenth-century life. He is not for ever straining himself to pass all the other boats. If another boat overtakes him and passes him it does not annoy him; as a matter of fact, they all do overtake him and pass him – all those that are going his way.

A beginner will be trying to get somewhere. An old boatman won’t mind too much about getting somewhere, and will get there more effectively.

Chapter 16 is about the stretch of Thames at Reading. Here the metaphorical maze we have been exploring takes a moral turn. J accepts an offer from a friend to have a steam launch pull their boat for a while. Now there is a shift in perspective for the three men in their boat. Until this point, steam launches have been the bad guys of the river, swaggering along, bullying little boats in their path. Now that J, Harris and George have joined the steam launch brigade, it is the rowing boats that become the enemy, getting in the way, causing trouble for the sake of it.

Following this lighthearted reflection on moral relativity, a much darker moment makes the same point. George sees a floating object which turns out to be the body of a young woman. Later the story of this woman is revealed, a not unusual tale for the time, of unexpected pregnancy outside marriage, the subsequent shaming and shunning of the woman by all who knew her, leading eventually to hopeless despair. Those who turned their backs on this unfortunate individual felt they were taking the moral high ground, when in J’s telling they become wicked. Virtue becomes vice, and vice versa. The moral maze takes a twist. Morality can be compared to the claims of fishermen, which we hear about in chapter 17, claims which famously cannot be trusted for a moment.

In chapter 18, J recalls a time when he and George were sitting in their boat waiting for a lock to fill. On the bank, a photographer was setting up a shot of all the happy travellers, hoping to sell the pictures to his subjects. Everyone strikes a pose, distracting J and George who fail to realise that the bow of their boat has become stuck in lock woodwork, threatening to tip their boat as the water level changes. Quick and ungainly action saves the day and spoils the shot. All photos of the Thames are still, while the actual river is ever moving and unpredictable. Movement might seem hazardous, just as a world with no fixed conception of morality might seem to offer no security. And yet the photograph scene suggests the real danger comes from trying to fix things that will not be fixed.

So we reach the final chapter. After two days in Oxford the travellers begin their return journey. They are going downstream now, going with the flow. But there is no feeling of ease. Rowing against the tide provided a feeling of achievement, whereas now the sense is more one of drifting. It starts to rain. The bright river of sunny days is reduced to a dirty brown stream. After originally going on this journey for their health, the travellers fear their health is under imminent threat. They abandon the boat early and catch a train back to Paddington, before heading to a restaurant in Leicester Square. You could say that the journey ends in disappointment and failure, and yet the lovely Leicester Square meal is more like a victory banquet. The rowers escape from the river, back into their everyday lives, now transformed into a sanctuary they are glad to find again. So even if the three travellers did not find a great destination at the end of their jaunt, even if they did not find the centre of the maze, they managed to find a way out, which in maze terms is success.

2018 Review

Holidays are odd things. They derive from exhausting pilgrimage where sedentary, medieval folk would up-sticks and walk hundreds of miles on muddy tracks, in unsuitable clothing, at the mercy of thieves, brigands and weather, to reach a distant shrine. Equally, holidays also derive from peaceful rest cures at spas and seaside towns, where instead of getting foot sore you’re more likely to get foot massage. This contradictory ancestry ends up combining a long physical ordeal in search of spiritual meaning with the beach resort experience, reclining on a lounger, watching waves lap on smooth sand, cool drink in hand.

Both the pilgrimage and sun lounger aspects of holidays are explored in Three Men in a Boat, Jerome K. Jerome’s nineteenth century account of a Thames boating trip. The nineteenth century was the time when holidays came into being for people generally. You no longer had to be religiously earnest, or be wealthy enough to sit around drinking mineral water in Bath or Tunbridge Wells. People were earning better money, had more free time and, thanks to the railways, could travel more easily. The three men who take Jerome’s boat trip are regular chaps. George works as a bank clerk. It’s not clear exactly what Harris and Jerome do, but you don’t get the sense that they are government ministers, captains of industry, or deep-thinking academics. They are the new holiday makers, embarking on a journey of ancient contradictions.

In many ways this boat trip is a spiritual pilgrimage, an attempt to leave behind the humdrum and find something more profound. Against a background of arduous effort and spartan living conditions, there are reflections on life and extravagant descriptions of nature in all its comforting, uplifting beauty. But the attempted profundities are always punctured by various down-to-earth mishaps involving ill-behaved dogs, poor boatmanship, bad cooking, vengeful steam launches, forgotten tin openers. While this journey might be seen as a kind of physically demanding pilgrimage, it is also an indolent escape from stress and strain. Each man takes it in turn to pull tricks to get out of rowing. Jerome avoids tours of churchyards containing historically significant graves. There is much lounging around in riverside meadows, and laughter at the memory of conscientious old school fellows who threw themselves into French irregular verbs.

So where does this physically demanding, yet languid – profound yet commonplace – journey take us? Without giving anything away about the “denouement”, it takes us somewhere significant, while allowing us to escape heavy significance. It takes us somewhere new, while also taking us home again with a new appreciation of our daily lives.

That’s what the best holidays do for us.