Confession

In one of David Lodge’s campus novels (”as opposed to what?” I hear you say. ”His social-realistic stories set in the rural south? They’re all campus novels”. Fair point) we come across the parlour game ”Humiliation” . Each participiant writes down the name of a book he or she hasn’t read. The winner, in a purely technical sense, is the participant whose choosen book has been read by the largest number of participiants (Hint: writing down ”the Da Vinci Code” doesn’t work half as often as you might think. It neither wins you the game, nor endears you to your friends). The name of the game, I take it, is fairly self-explanatory. In the novel (”Nice work”, it might have been. Or ”Small world”), a professor of english literature, desperate to win, owns up to not having read ”Hamlet” and is subsequently fired from his position.

Anyway, I’m just about to loose my winning entry for this game. I’m finally reading ”Three men in a boat”. The fact that I haven’t read it already is not so much humiliating, perhaps, as inexplicable. Not only is it the hands down, drop dead funniest book I’ve ever read, it is also, arguably, the source of everything that have been funny every since. Literary slap-stick at its best, and a grand festival of non-sequiturs. It is also an excellent display of that celebrated, scorned and recently hotly debated comic device: the cutaway joke. Done well, as it is in ”three men”, it doesn’t bring the story to a screetching halt, or it does, but you don’t mind. The point is that what’s beside the point (or beside the plot, anyway), just is the point.