Jerome K. Jerome. Diary of a Pilgrimage.

The joy of any Jerome K. Jerome book is not the destination but the journey itself. I take that back – the joy of any Jerome book are the digressions and tangents during the journey. He lacks the descriptive detail of, say, Mark Twain or even the later Jack Kerouac. In fact, as travelogues, they’re dull and insipid. Jerome’s strengths are his humorous anecdotes, underlying sarcasm, and the orchestrated, snowballing comedic scenes

His second published work, Diary of a Pilgrimage involves a journey. J. (what the narrator calls himself) and B. head to Germany for the Oberammergau Passion Play, a performance that lasts seven hours.

“Will you come?’ B. asks.
Jerome answers:
I pondered for a moment, looked at my diary, and saw that Aunt Emma was coming to spend Saturday to Wednesday next with us, calculated that if I went I should miss her and might not see her again for years, and decided that I would go.

All of Jerome K. Jerome’s characters are selfish, sarcastic, argumentative, lazy, and Anglo-centric. Consider this characterization in his most famous novel, Three Men in a Boat (1889): “That's Harris all over - so ready to take the burden of everything himself, and put it on the backs of other people.” Nowhere is a better summation of his characters.

Consider the scene when the travelers enter an overbooked carriage with every seat reserved by passengers’ luggage. After some shifting (not to mention moralizing), the two break the unspoken rule of luggage laid means seat saved and take one for themselves. The scene’s joy isn’t until another passenger arrives and also shifts luggage for a seat, a maneuver that infuriates the narrator to berate the culprit, despite having done the same.

The humorous tone of the novel, or diary, changes after the Passion play, for obvious reasons. Jerome is very earnest in his Christian beliefs and I, at least, acknowledge the sentiment and emotions put forth in the performance’s description, though I don’t agree with the beliefs. Its structure is a flaw that almost sinks the book.

Yet all his books seem to have such flaws. Three Men in a Boat is dulled by its insistence to be a travelogue and record well-known landmarks of the River Thames. There is also the aimless wandering of his much later Three Men on the Bummel, which is a journey with no destination. Jeremy Nicholas, President of the Jerome K. Jerome Society, summer it up best:

The trump card that Bummel lacks, and which makes Three Men in a Boat what it is, is the River Thames.... It provides the framework for Jerome's discursive narrative. He can stray from the present adventure as much as he likes...but the river holds the whole thing together and gives the book its satisfying unity. The best television situation comedies rely on this same device, a world with clearly-defined parameters. A ramble through Germany and the Black Forest does not provide that.

The key to the passage, I think, is the reference to television situation comedies: That is what to expect from Jerome. Nothing deep or profound, but the comedy is strong enough to shake giants.