Three Men in a Boat Read Online Free Page A

with half-witted maids, irreverent errand boys, gossiping neighbours and all those other hazards that affect those who are anxious to impress but seldom succeed, and the Three Men seem far less embattled and altogether more sure of their place in the world than poor, pompous Mr Pooter, brow-beaten at work and fussily incompetent on the domestic front. Both books, Pritchett suggests, exploit ‘that understatement which runs like a rheumatism through English humour’, which may be true enough; but whereas
The Diary of a Nobody
is classic English social comedy, making much of class differences and the sad absurdities of social pretensions,
Three Men in a Boat
is brisker and far less agonized, and reads at times like so many ‘Idle Thoughts’ held together with dabs of narrative glue.
    Though J. is, appropriately, a journalist, the Three Men are – like Mr Pooter’s disrespectful son, Lupin – direct descendants of the perkier kind of Dickensian clerk. They live in digs with kindly but overbearing landladies; ground down at work, they prove boisterous and defiant when unleashed on the wider world. Their longing to be ‘free from that fretful haste, that vehement striving, that is every day becoming more and more the bane of nineteenth-century life’ has a familiar ring to it. ‘At Cookham,’ Pritchett sardonically observes, ‘these suburbans will imagine themselves in the “wild heart of nature” ’, and, like many city-dwellers, they tend to romanticize and idealize country living and country folk, at least until the weather breaks. And, like most oppressed office workers, they console themselves with home-spun homilies about the vanity and transience of earthly fame and riches. ‘Throw the lumber over, man!’ the narrator urges his readers. ‘Let your boat of life be light, packed only with what you need – a homely home and simple pleasures, one or two friends, worth the name, someone to love and someone to love you, a cat, a dog, and a pipe or two, enough to eat and enough to wear, and a little more than enough to drink…’ They dislike thesnobs who live in Maidenhead – many of them weekenders, travelling down from Paddington on the Great Western Railway – and snooty, exclusive ‘riparian proprietors’ who try to keep out the ‘hoi-polloi’ with white-painted posts and chains and ‘No Trespassing’ signs: the proprietors, for their part, no doubt detested these urban intruders who wandered on to their land and chopped up their trees for firewood, but their point of view remains unaired. ‘Bally’ counts as strong language, and when things go wrong, as they always do, those responsible are denounced as ‘You cuckoo!’ or ‘You dunder-headed idiots!’ George plays the banjo, badly (‘They are all the rage this season,’ he explains); much pleasure is had from joshing, facetious word-play of the kind that riled the thinking classes, so that when Harris treads on George’s corns, George – mellowed by supper and a pipe and a noggin of whisky – merely murmurs ‘Steady, old man, ’ware wheat!’ A good deal is made of familiar problems like packing and oversleeping and unreliable weather-forecasters; as is to be expected of men on their own, they make heavy weather of sleeping arrangements, tread or sit down on astonishingly resilient pats of butter, and brew up repellent Irish stews into which every known ingredient is hurled.
    As they nudge their way upstream from Kingston-on-Thames to Oxford, we’re treated to a series of reminiscences and digressions, triggered off by happenings along the way, and suitably conversational in tone. J.’s pompous Uncle Podger is recalled trying to hang a picture, leaving a trail of devastation in his wake; the unavailability of hotel bedrooms in the Windsor and Datchet area is remembered in harrowing detail; in Wallingford they’re subjected to a cascade of fishermen’s tall stories, each more bogus than the last. Jerome makes much of the malice and