Thank you!

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(Firstly, apologies if my review of Love at Second Sight, see below, appears twice in Google Reader etc. – I published it early by mistake, then deleted and republished!)

I’ve found the discussion on yesterday’s post so, so interesting and helpful – thank you so much for joining in, if you did.  I hope it was clear that my post was talking to myself, as much as anyone, and that I was trying to address a more general point about the blogosphere, rather than just my blog.  I’m glad so many of us are going to make the same commenting resolution for 2013!  (Although this particular little post can probably be ignored, commentingwise ;) )

Just an update – I recently reinstated the word verification (having had it off for ages) because I was sick of getting dozens of spam comments everyday.  Blogger works out that they’re spam, and they don’t appear here, but they fill up my inbox.  However, after feedback yesterday, I’ve removed the word verification – as that does seem to make quite a difference to people’s experience of commenting.

Happy Thursday!  I’ll be spending much of my day on a train – but it’ll be worth it, cos I’m going hoooome for Chriiiiistmas!  I’ll reply to all of your comments (another thing which seems to make a difference, and which is a heck of a lot more fun for me than deleting spam emails!) as soon as I can.

Love at Second Sight by Ada Leverson

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Whilst rooting around for a 1916 title for A Century of Books (you should have seen me, scrabbling through my books, opening covers, reading publication details, reshelving huffily) I stumbled upon Love At Second Sight by Ada Leverson.  It’s the third book in The Little Ottleys, of which I have previously read the first – Love’s Shadow – which was rather brilliant.  This is the only time A Century of Books has really rather compromised my reading plans – in that I skipped past the second title in the trilogy (Tenterhooks) straight to the third.  But someone had spoken on The Little Ottleys at a recent conference, and given away the plot, so it wasn’t as calamitous as it could have been.

Look away if you don’t want to know what happened in the first two novels… but they’ve (to be very brief) set up the fairly loveless marriage of Edith and Bruce; Edith falls in love with Aylmer Ross, but will not leave her husband, even when he asks for a divorce himself (having run off with another woman); he comes back to her, and everything settles down into what it had been before – which is to say, an amusing, charming, patient woman, and an exasperating man.  Bruce is best summed up by this wonderful quotation from Love’s Shadow: “He often wrote letters beginning “Sir, I feel it my duty,” to people on subjects that were no earthly concern of his.”  As for the lovely Edith, I’ll hand over to Leverson to describe her.  An author should show and not tell, as a rule, but all these qualities in Edith have been exemplified in previous books, so it is forgiveable that Leverson wants to let us know what a wonder she is, so that we can get on with the show.

She was a slim, fair, pretty woman, with more vividness and character than usually goes with her type.  Like the boy, she had long-lashed grey eyes, and blonde-cendre hair: her mouth and chin were of the Burne-Jones order, and her charm, which was great but unintentional, and generally unconscious, appealed partly to the senses and partly to the intellect.  She was essentially not one of those women who irritate all their own sex by their power (and still more by their fixed determination) to attract men; she was really and unusually indifferent to general admiration.  Still, that she was not a cold woman, not incapable of passionate feeling, was obvious to any physiognomist; the fully curved lips showed her generous and pleasure-loving temperament, while the softly glancing, intelligent, smiling eyes spoke fastidiousness and discrimination.  Her voice was low and soft, with a vibrating sound in it, and she laughed often and easily, being very ready to see and enjoy the amusing side of life.  But observation and emotion alike were instinctively veiled by a quiet, reposeful manner, so that she made herself further popular by appearing retiring.  Edith Ottley might so easily have been the centre of any group, and yet – she was not!  Women were grateful to her, and in return admitted that she was pretty, unaffected and charming.

Love At Second Sight opens with a scream.  The Ottleys’ son Archie has, it seemed, used Madame Frabelle’s mandolin as a cricket bat, and she is not best pleased.  And who might Madame Frabelle be, you ask?  The Ottleys want to ask much the same thing.  Their delightfully forgetful and absent-minded friend Lady Conroy introduced them (although later denied ever having heard of her, and in fact asks for an introduction herself) – and Madame Frabelle arrives for a visit.  Which has lengthened itself into many, many weeks.  She is charming, a great listener, given to understanding people – noticing their subtlest of thoughts, predicting their actions, and invariably being wrong about everything.

Indeed Edith did sincerely regard her opinion as very valuable.  She found her so invariably wrong that she was quite a useful guide. She was never quite sure of her own judgement until Madame Frabelle had contradicted it.
Madame Frabelle is determined that Edith is in love with Mr. Mitchell, another of the Ottleys acquaintances.  What neither Madame Frabelle nor Bruce notice is that Edith is in love – with Aylmer, who has returned from fighting in France with a broken leg.  Edith has to face a quandary – whether or not to leave her husband…

As I say, I haven’t read Tenterhooks, where a similar story takes place, so I can only contrast this with the first book in the trilogy.  In that (again, c.f. my review here), we see a marriage which is irksome and unequal, but in a comic fashion.  All the will-they-won’t-they plot concerns a multitude of other characters, none of whom have stayed in my mind, and the central Ottley marriage is stable, if awful.  Bruce’s absurd lack of self-awareness is hilarious, and his terribleness as a husband is darkly humorous – in Love At Second Sight, more is at stake, and more than a punchline is likely to come out of this incompatible couple.

Which is not to say that the novel isn’t funny.  It is very amusing, especially when Lady Conroy wanders onto the scene.  Ada Leverson was friends with Oscar Wilde, and his influence is apparent – if anything, rather more so than in Love’s Shadow, because she turns to the epigram rather more frequently in Love At Second Sight – par example, ‘she was a woman who was never surprised at anything except the obvious and the inevitable’.  Sometimes this clash of serious storyline and comic prose was a little disconcerting – I thought the balance worked better in Love’s Shadow – but  this is still a wonderful little book.

Of course, what you should do is get the trilogy and read them in order!  I’ll read Tenterhooks one day, and then everything will fall into place properly…

On Commenting

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This might seem like a navel-gazing post, but I’m going to try hard to make it more general.  It’s responding to something I’ve noticed in the literary blogosphere at large – I think it is a wider phenomenon – which is the decline in comments on blog posts.

Speaking specifically about Stuck-in-a-Book, the number of comments I anticipate getting, particularly on a book review, has actually decreased slightly from four or five years ago, despite the fact that my stats counter tells me I’m getting ten times as many readers now.  I’m lucky if 0.5% of the people who visit each day leave a comment, which seems an extraordinarily low percentage – and I’ve seen this trend around my favourite blogs, whether they have large or smaller audiences.  Perhaps nobody else thinks this is the case, in which case this post may end up discussing something unique to my blog, but do let me know (ha!) in the comments if you do or don’t agree with my observation.

Personally, I always find it hard to realise that people have read a post if they don’t comment.  Although I see that my blog is getting however many thousand hits a week, in my head it’s only the tens of commenters who register.  That’s not intended to be a gripe, it’s just an illumination of the curious way my mind works – but perhaps yours does too?

I want to write in praise of comments.  Like many bloggers, I am passionate about the community in blogging – I beat the drum for community, and try to get involved as much as possible.  That’s why I join in with readalongs, or start my own; that’s why I have run three series of My Life in Books so enthusiastically, and why I celebrate people like Kim, who is currently running a series of Bloggers’ Best Books of 2012.  Obviously a lot of blogging is necessarily done alone, and presents an individual’s take on their personal reading life – but the reason we’re all writing and reading on the internet, instead of jotting our thoughts in a notebook, is because we want to share the experience with others.

When I’m reading other people’s blogs, all too often I forget how important the comment box is.  Today’s post is directed at myself, as much as anyone else.  I read the post with interest, and appreciate the bloggers’ perception or humour.  I might well jot down the title of the book somewhere, or even head straight off and buy it.  But, although I comment a fair amount (as do many of you), too often I move off somewhere else without having written anything.  It’s a bit like leaving a party without thanking the hostess.

The comment box is a portal.  It stops the blogger being isolated, and brings the reader to their side.  It makes what might seem the loneliest of pursuits into a two-way conversation and a bustling world of long-distance friends.  Sometimes it adds information to the exchange, and that is wonderful; mostly it just adds appreciation or recognition – or even contradiction, which is, in fact, another form of recognition.  Sometimes I think, “But I don’t have anything to say.”  And what I probably mean is, “I don’t have any personal knowledge on this topic”, which isn’t the same thing at all.  A comment needn’t be the product of research.  A comment, any comment, demonstrates the time, energy, and thought put into writing is worthwhile – but is also rewards the reading time; it puts the reader in dialogue with the writer, and it elevates them both.  Even a humble “this sounds interesting” feels like a warm smile, and a “great review” like a bearhug.

Perhaps it is because there are so many blogs now, and people don’t want to scatter their responses too prolifically.  Perhaps (more prosaically) it is because signing up and word verification have got so much more complicated.  But, on behalf of myself and every other blogger out there, I want to champion the commenter and laud the comment box.  It is the lifeblood of the blogosphere, and I apologise for forgetting that myself.  I’ll be making a New Year’s Blog Resolution to comment more often as I read around the blogosphere, and maybe some of you will too.  Perhaps some of you have never commented on a blog before – perhaps 2013 can be the year you step across the great divide!  I’d love to know the thoughts of any blogger or blog-reader, on the topic of comments?  I’d hate for that side of blogging to slope away – let’s continue to support one another, and make blogging the wonderful, intelligent, friendly, joyous, constructive conversation it can be.

A Cab at the Door – V.S. Pritchett

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More Slightly Foxed!  Yay!  Well, this one was actually a little bonus – earlier in the year, when they sent me the fabulous Look Back With Love by Dodie Smith, they inadvertently sent me A Cab at the Door by V.S. Pritchett first.  And then very kindly said I could have both.  Having recently adored Blue Remembered Hills, I realised I couldn’t go long without another fix of Slightly Foxed, and so grabbed A Cab at the Door (1968).

I have to confess, I’ve spent much of my adult life confusing V.S. Pritchett and V.S. Naipaul (he of the I’m-better-than-all-women rant).  As crimes go, it’s not the worst, and I hadn’t actually read anything by either of them – but now I’m sure that Pritchett is going to be my favourite V.S.  Sorry, Italian astronomer V.S. Casulli.  Tough break.

Like all the Slightly Foxed Editions (of which this is no.3), A Cab at the Door is a memoir – stretching further than some, in that it takes us beyond childhood, up until the time Pritchett breaks away from his parents and leaves home for France.  Like most memoirists, Pritchett seems to have been blessed with more amusing, regional relatives than the average person (c’mon, my relatives, be more comical) but although we have entertaining visits to these, the dominant character in this memoir is Pritchett’s father.  And I choose the word dominant deliberately.  Whatever other merits the book has, I think its greatest achievement is a rich and complex portrait of the sort of man who would simply appear as an ogre in fiction.

Father (if his name is mentioned, I have forgotten it – as I invariably forget names) is selfish, arrogant, and angry.  His cruelty is that peculiar brand which stems from monumental self-delusion – he drives his family deeply into debt, but appears to believe it is none of his doing.  He has constant ambition to better himself and his standing in society (and even achieves it to a degree, eventually, becoming a Managing Director) but doesn’t care how his failures along the way ruin and sadden his wife and children.  His wife – a lively and somewhat crude woman – is all but forbidden from entertaining, and is constantly carted from pillar to post, as they move to escape his debts.  The eponymous cab at the door is Pritchett’s familiar childhood sight, waiting to take them to their next home.

But because this is non-fiction, Father is not the caricatured evil man, nor his wife the stereotypical woman whose character is squashed out of her.  Instead, despite his unkindness to his younger son, and his unpredictable behaviour towards Victor himself, there is still love in him.  His wife still has moments of shrieking with laughter; Victor can still bond with his father over literature, occasionally, even if his own early attempts at writing are loudly derided.  And what novelist would have the masterstroke of making Father become a fierce proponent of Christian Science?  It is a truly exceptional portrait of a complicated man – and a portrait which is never finished to the artist’s satisfaction, simply because he could not be comprehended.  Pritchett writes this brilliant paragraph towards the end:

Right up to the day of his death in his eighties, none of us children could settle our view of him.  It was simple to call him the late Victorian dominant male without whose orders no one could think or move.  It was only partly true that he was a romantic procrastinator, egotist and dreamer, for he was a very calculating man.  Sometimes we saw him as the unchanged country boy, given to local shrewdness and gossip.  (He loved the malicious gossip of his church and his trade.)  Sometimes we saw him as a pocket Napoleon, but he never even tried to obtain the wealth or power he often talked about.  His mind was more critical than creative and he was appalled by criticism of himself.  He would go pale, hold up his hand and say, “You must not criticise me.”  He sincerely meant he was beyond criticism and felt in himself a sort of sacredness.
A Cab at the Door doesn’t have the warmth and delight of other Slightly Foxed books – it doesn’t intend to – and so, while Pritchett cannot compete with Dodie Smith and Rosemary Sutcliff for my affections, his task is different and executed incredibly well.

There are, of course, other angles and facets to this memoir, but I thought it worth identifying and discussing the one which set it apart from others that I have read.  Perhaps not one to curl up with in front of the festive log fire (for that, get Look Back With Love or Blue Remembered Hills, I cannot encourage you enough) but certainly an impressive portrait of a frustrating man, exactly the right ratio of objective and personal, an exemplary achievement.

The Joke – Milan Kundera

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Last month I (coincidentally) read a spate of successful authors’ first books – Agatha Christie’s, Katherine Mansfield’s, A.A. Milne’s – which is always an interesting exercise, and the fourth ‘first book’ I read was The Joke (1967) by Milan Kundera, given to me by my friend Lucy.  It could have worked for Reading Presently next year, but it also covered a tricky 1960s gap in A Century of Books.  Usually, with translated books, I am keen to mention the translator – but a fascinating Author’s Note at the end of The Joke explains that this fifth translation of the novel (from Czech) is really a combination of translations by David Hamblyn, Oliver Stallybrass, Michael Heim, and Kundera himself.  In case you still think Kundera might be a bit of a slacker, he is also responsible for the cover art.

The Joke is broadly about the way in which someone can (or cannot) be an individual within the Communist regime of 1950s Czechoslovakia, and the impact one decision can make on the rest of a person’s life.  Although possibly not the only ‘joke’ in the novel (the Wikipedia entry manfully identifies three), the pivotal moment of the novel comes early on.  Ludvik is a university professor and member of the Communist party – his somewhat humourless female friend is away on a training course, and they are corresponding…

From the training course (it took place at one of the castles of central Bohemia) she sent me a letter that was pure Marketa: full of earnest enthusiasm for everything around her; she liked everything: the early-morning calisthenics, the talks, the discussions, even the songs they sang; she praised the “healthy atmosphere” that reigned there; and diligently she added a few words to the effect that the revolution in the West would not be long in coming.
 
As far as that goes, I quite agreed with what she said; I too believed in the imminence of a revolution in Western Europe; there was only one thing I could not accept: that she should be so happy when I was missing her so much. So I bought a postcard and (to hurt, shock, and confuse her) wrote: Optimism is the opium of the people!  A healthy atmosphere stinks of stupidity!  Long live Trotsky!  Ludvik.
It turns out the Communist party don’t appreciate a giggle, and Ludvik is ousted from his job, exiled from the party, and sent off to do two years at a military camp.  Whilst there he meets, and falls in love with, a mysterious woman named Lucie.  At the end of the novel, various different strands (including a few that I haven’t addressed – like Kostka whose Christian faith is taking him away from Communism) coalesce and overlap at an old-fashioned parade, and the multiple viewpoints Kundera has used for different sections all come together and collide, taking short chapters each without indicating whose voice is speaking.

Although Kundera rather overloads The Joke with different perspectives and competing storylines, it is only really Ludvik’s story which stands out; the rest feels like it is stuck on to the sides of his engaging point of view and intriguing experiences.  His reflections upon political doctrine, personal affections, and the curious unpredictability of cause-and-effect are all compelling – let’s face it, any novel which can get me even mildly interested in politics has achieved more than the public press has in the past 27 years.

But, although you can see the seeds of his later experimentalism, The Joke is a much more straightforward novel than the one which made me a fan, Immortality.  That is hardly surprising for a first novel, and this has that curious combination of putting-too-much-in with a lack of novelistic ambition.  If I hadn’t read a couple of his later novels, I wouldn’t have noticed the deficit – this is still a very good novel, and probably more to the taste of a lot of people than his postmodern work – but I have, so I do.  I was intrigued by one or two hints of his future work, including this (from a man trying to spot his disguised son in the parade):

My son.  The person nearest to me.  I stand in front of him, and I don’t even know whether it is he or not.  What, then, do I know if I don’t know even that?  Of what am I sure in this world if I don’t have even that certainty?
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is the catalyst for Identity. I think if I’d read The Joke first, I’d have been impressed but probably not actively sought out more Kundera.  As it is, I really appreciated being able to see where he started as a novelist – and how he progressed from there.

Are there any authors whose first novels, read after later ones, have really surprised you?

Song for a Sunday

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Most of you probably know Natalie Imbruglia’s song ‘Torn’, and thought her something of a one-hit wonder.  Well, I’ve always rather liked her second album, White Lilies Island, and especially the track ‘Do You Love?’  I don’t know if this is an official video or made by the Youtube uploader, but… well, have a great Sunday!

Stuck-in-a-Book’s Weekend Miscellany

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It’s all rather damp and miserable chez Stuck-in-a-Book at the moment.  Damp house, damp streets, even a book gone mouldy because I foolishly left it on the window sill (sorry, The Haunted Woman by David Lindsay, mea culpa.)  But by next weekend I’ll be back home – with family, cat, log fire, and such.  So, my final damp weekend miscellany of 2012, and possibly my final weekend miscellany of 2012, damp or otherwise.

1.) The book – stuck for something to give a bibliophile under the Christmas tree?  I was recently sent 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die by Octopus Publishing.  I’m sure a lot of us love these sorts of lists, and this book is far more than just lists, of course.  Lots of info by well-informed people (including my supervisor, I noticed!) as well as lovely pictures etc.  Since I’ve only read 80 or 90 of ’em, I’ve got plenty to go before I die.  More info here.  It’s a really nicely produced book, and I think it would make for great discussion on Boxing Day.

2.) The link – will go over (or perhaps under) the heads of most, but I think some of you in your 20s will appreciate this… I was obsessed with R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps books when I was about 10.  I’m sure OV and OVW can attest to my need to read them ALL, and they generously identified (and encouraged) the love of reading rather than my deplorable lack of taste.  For those not in the know, Goosebumps are ‘horror’ books for young children, with cliffhangers every few pages, utterly unconvincing characters, and always a huge, often nonsensical, twist at the end.  I loved ’em.  Well, some brave soul has re-read them all as an adult, and written hilarious reviews at Blogger Beware.  I’ve spent hours there.  Enjoy!

3.) The blog post – while quite a few bloggers do the TBR Challenge in the early months of the year, where they only read unread books from their shelves, Ali is spearheading A Month of Re-reading in January.  More info here, but the gist is pretty obvious – a month of re-reading books!  Lots of us who have 1001 books we want to read before we die (or before book group next Wednesday, as it may be) may feel like we never have time to re-read, so it’s nice to set aside time to do it.  It wouldn’t really work with my Reading Presently project, so I shan’t be joining in this year, but it’s something I’ll definitely keep in mind for the future.

By the way, out of interest, are there many of you using the subscribe-by-email option?

On Acting – Laurence Olivier

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As if to act as an antidote to Emma’s disdain for the theatre, in Margaret Drabble’s The Garrick Year, I have just finished reading Laurence Olivier’s On Acting (1986), lent to me by my friend Andrea.  Nobody could accuse Olivier of disdaining the theatre – indeed, his adulation for it far exceeds mine, and he has (of course) a much more experienced and wise eye to cast over it.

I was a little unsure about reading On Acting, because I’m not a huge fan of Olivier (he falls into the Kenneth Branagh category of just-too-actory for me) and thought it was his autobiography – but it turns out that he’d already published his autobiography, Confessions of an Actor, and this volume instead focused on the craft of the actor, particularly on playing Shakespeare on stage and screen.  Perfect!

Olivier starts off with a brief history of great actors of the past – Burbage, Kean et al – which isn’t a very auspicious start to the book.  As I discovered throughout the book, Olivier delivers anecdotes appallingly.  In this section, he often suffixes them with the acknowledgement that they’re probably false – and somehow he mismanages each anecdote so that it falls oddly flat.  I began to worry.  But once Olivier started writing about the craftsmanship of acting, he got much, much better.  The largest section of On Acting concerns various significant roles in Shakespeare, devoting a chapter to each.  Olivier writes of Hamlet, Othello, Richard III and more, with firsthand insight into playing the roles, and explaining how he developed and discovered the characters.  This stuff is like catnip to me.  Olivier’s exploration of these characters is attached to specific performances and is very personal, it cannot and does not claim to be objective literary criticism, but it’s fascinating.

How I love to read actors’ theories about the theatre!  Olivier does not skimp on this.  Here’s an excerpt I loved:

To achieve true theatre, you can’t have one man up front and the acolytes with their backs to the audience feeding the great star with lines as dull as dishwater.  What you must have is every character believing in himself and, therefore, contributing to the piece as a whole, placing and pushing the play in the right direction.  The third spear carrier on the left should believe that the play is all about the third spear carrier on the left.  I’ve always believed that.  If the character is nameless, the actor should give himself a name.  He should give himself a family, a background, a past.  Where was he born, what did he have for breakfast?  Perhaps he had troubles at home, perhaps his wife has left him, perhaps his wife has just presented him with a new baby, perhaps he is saving for something – and so on.  If the actor brings on with him a true belief in himself, we should be able to look at him at any moment during the action and see a complete three-dimensional figure and not a cardboard cut-out.  To transport an audience, they must see life and not paste.
It is, though, one of the few times that he acknowledges the need for a united company.  One of the things that did irk me in On Acting is the isolation in which Olivier prepares his roles – there seemed no sense that other actors’ decision might affect his performances, or even that he was aware of them.  He is also monumentally egotistical (he claims all actors must be) and often congratulates himself on brilliant work – which is perhaps the prerogative of the aging actor, looking back over a long and successful career.  When writing about film, he is a little less self-confident, and I gained a lot of respect for Olivier when he acknowledged the failings of his version of Pride and Prejudice:

I was very unhappy with the picture.  It was difficult to make Darcy into anything more than an unattractive-looking prig, and darling Greer seemed to me all wrong as Elizabeth.  To me, Jane Austen had made Elizabeth different from her affected, idiotic sister; she was the only down-to-earth one, but Greer played her as the most affected and silly of the lot.  I also thought that the best points in the book were missed, although apparently no one else did.
You’re not alone, Olivier!  I didn’t think it worked at all…

This isn’t the place to come if you want gossip about Olivier’s life.  Perhaps Confessions of an Actor has that, but I rather imagine it doesn’t.  On Acting isn’t just for the aspiring actor, either – goodness knows I have no ambitions in that direction – but it is a fascinating look behind the red curtain, and an authoritative examination of the acting profession.  Coming at it from another direction, it has unusual and interesting readings of Shakespeare’s plays.  Olivier is not a very gifted writer, although a mostly competent one, but his acting talent and vast experience excuse his mediocrity in that regard – and make On Acting a very engaging read.  It would seem an inexcusable boast from most actors, to cover so broad a topic as acting, but somehow Laurence Olivier seems (and certainly believes himself to be) the man allowed to do it.

1909

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I started the year resisting any sort of organisation to A Century of Books – I didn’t want to decide my books in advance, as that would remove the spontaneity which is the cornerstone of my love of reading.  But, as 2012 creeps away, I have pencilled in the books I will read for the remaining 10 years – spending quite some time opening books on my bookshelf to look at the publication date, and being frustrated by how many of the books I want to read fall in the 1920-1950 category (quelle surprise!)  But I have my list, and there are nine wonderful books waiting on it, all of which I’m excited to read… but only nine.

What on earth was published in 1909?

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I’ve consulted Wikipedia, and a very useful Chronology of Literature reference book that my Dad gave me, so it’s not quite true that I’ve found no books for 1909.  I just haven’t found any books that I have – except Ann Veronica by H.G. Wells, which is on the maybe list (but quite long to fit in alongside all the rest, and one or two people have told me that it’s not great.)

So I don’t really want suggestions for books simply published in 1909 – I also want them to appear in My Library, which you can search here.  So if any of you fancy doing some homework… let me know your ideas!  You see, sometimes I delude myself into thinking that I’m Mildly Internet Famous, and that Blog Readers will run around being my minions… so if you want me to come back to reality, then ignore me ;)

Three Men on the Bummel – Jerome K. Jerome

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Jerome K. Jerome has been on my radar recently, since Catherine at Victorian Secrets sent me a new biography of him – Below the Fairy City: A Life of Jerome K. Jerome by Carolyn W. de la L. Oulton – which I hope to read soon.  More on that from the publisher’s website here.  But before I got Catherine’s message, and subsequently the book, I was already thinking about Jerome – because I’ve recently finished Three Men on the Bummel, the sequel to his very well-known novel Three Men on a Boat, which I reviewed here.  It also takes the coveted 1900 place on my Century of Books.

George and Harris rejoin Jerome (our narrator) as they go off on the bummel.  What is a bummel, you ask?  Well, Jerome answers the question for us, but not until the final page.  I’m going to save you the mystery:

“A ‘Bummel’,” I explained, “I should describe as a journey, long or short, without an end; the only thing regulating it being the necessity of getting back within a given time to the point from which one started. Sometimes it is through busy streets, and sometimes through the fields and lanes; sometimes we can be spared for a few hours, and sometimes for a few days. But long or short, but here or there, our thoughts are ever on the running of the sand. We nod and smile to many as we pass; with some we stop and talk awhile; and with a few we walk a little way. We have been much interested, and often a little tired. But on the whole we have had a pleasant time, and are sorry when ’tis over.”
Theirs takes the form of cycling through Germany, and commenting on the things that happen there.  Cycling holidays were rather the craze, and travel guides for Europe were equally popular, but the narrator is keen to correct the reader who might have picked up the book for the wrong reason:

I wish to be equally frank with the reader of this book.  I wish here conscientiously to let forth its shortcomings.  I wish no one to read this book under a misapprehension. 

There will be no useful information in this book. 

Anyone who should think that with the aid of this book he would be able to make a tour through Germany and the Black Forest would probably lose himself before he got to the Nore.  That, at all events, would be the best thing that could happen to him.  The farther away from home he got, the greater only would be his difficulties. 

I do not regard the conveyance of useful information as my forte.  This belief was not inborn with me; it has been driven home upon me by experience.
Well, he’s not wrong there!  If you thought Three Men on a Boat went off on a lot of tangents, then you’d have to psyche yourself up to read this – there isn’t really anything but tangents.  They’d cycle for a bit (well, it took some time to get even as far as the holiday itself) and something would remind the narrator of a past event, or he’d wander off on a pages-long anecdote about something that happened earlier in the week, etc. etc.  It was often difficult to work out what was past and what was present, so tenuous was any attempt at linear narrative.  But did that matter?  No, of course not.  Not in the slightest.  Jerome K. Jerome is a hilarious writer, and that is the point of Three Men on the Bummel.

The anecdotes interweave and overlap, and are so long, that it’s difficult to give you a flavour of his writing – but I did find one excerpt which was short enough to type out and shows you how funny Jerome can be:

He handed me a small book bound in red cloth.  It was a travel guide to English conversation for the use of German travellers.  It commenced “On a Steamboat,” and terminated “At the Doctor’s”; its longest chapter being devoted to conversation in a railway carriage, among, apparently, a compartment load full of quarrelsome and ill-mannered lunatics: “Can you not get further away from me, sir?” – “It is impossible, madam; my neighbour, here, is very stout” – “Shall we not endeavour to arrange our legs?” – “Please have the goodness to keep your elbows down” – “Pray do not inconvenience yourself, madam, if my shoulder is of any accommodation to you,” whether intended to be said sarcastically or not, there was nothing to indicate – “I really must request you to move a little, madam, I can hardly breathe,” the author’s idea being, presumably, that by this time the whole party was mixed up together on the floor.  The chapter concluded with the phrase, “Here we are at our destination, God be thanked!” (Gott sei dank!)” a pious exclamation, which under the circumstances must have taken the form of a chorus.
Quite a lot of the novel’s humour comes from the stereotype that Germanic cultures are organised, regimented, and orderly.  Any humour depending on national archetypes is apt to make us feel a little uncomfortable, but hopefully that wouldn’t ruin the book for you.  The narrator is, any how, greatly admiring of this trait – and if we were to ignore any British novel which cast Germany in a negative light, it would wipe out most of the first half of the 20th century.  I’m sure most of us are willing to accept a book as being from the time it was written.

Three Men on the Bummel was read while I was myself ‘on the bummel’ – through the Lake District – and I was able to smile wryly at the humorous misadventures the heroes experienced at the hands of transport and weather, and was only too grateful that I haven’t ridden a bicycle since I was 14.  It’s been so long since I read Three Men on a Boat that I’d be hard pressed to compare them minutely, or choose a favourite, but this certainly isn’t a poor relation – it’s very, very funny and one of the silliest books I’ve read in years.