Three Men in a Boat: To Say Nothing of the Dog Reviews

For a humour novel, this one isn't all that funny. The jokes are predictable and none too subtle. The author tries too hard to be witty but often fails. What's more annoying is the author's tendency to go into tangents about whatever English history he feels inclined to plunge into in the middle of a narrative. The humour is often forced, so are the main character's contemplations of nature, philosophy and whatever that takes his fancy. It seems like the author felt that without those 'serious' discourses, the book would have been just a silly little novel about three English guys who goes on a boat trip. Well, it didn't help.

_Three Men in a Boat_ probably has more historical value for its descriptions of the English landscape along the River Thames in the 19th-century than any real literary value. However, the humour, which might have been relevant in Victorian time, has lost whatever force it once had on a contemporary reader, or at least on this one. Besides, the topics of boating and fishing bored me to tears.