Three Men on the Bummel by Jerome K. Jerome
Endnotes by Jeremy Lewis
181 pages
Published 1900
Read from February 8 to February 10
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
Two stages in the evolution of the leisure classes are of particular interest to me (three if you count backpacking): the "flivver" age, and the mania for bicycle touring immediately before it. I learned about this book not from a Connie Willis time travel novel (which got me into Three Men in a Boat), but through researching "new" H. G. Wells novels to read. It seems Wells wrote a comic novel called The Wheels of Chance, drawing from the experience of a cycling holiday. Amazon reviewers compared Wells' effort unfavorably to Three Men on the Bummel, a tendency I noted but largely forgot about until I ILL'd a copy of Three Men in a Boat that came bundled with Bummel.
On the whole, Boat is the stronger (and funnier) novel, but Bummel is more consistent in tone, eschewing the Romantic and morbid interludes of Jerome's fictionalized river journey. Sadly, little cycling is actually described; Jerome from the outset devotes most of his space to comic digressions and ethnological observations, tossing out a couple bicycling anecdotes for flavor early on but thereafter concentrating on a satirical look at the German in his native land. Two things, apparently, have changed little in 115 years: jokes about bicycle seats, and jokes about the rigid, robotic, obedient German. The back cover blurb notes the "with hindsight, prophetic" insights into the German state of mind, an inadvertent prophecy that really only occupies a couple lines: "Hitherto, the German has had the blessed fortune to be exceptionally well governed; if this continues, all will go well with him. When his troubles will begin will be when by any chance something goes wrong with the governing machine."
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