Sequels are rarely as good as the original and this follow-up to Three Men in a Boat is no exception to the general rule. In this one our intrepid trio go on a cycling tour of the Black Forest. There are some genuinely funny set pieces mixed in with an awful lot of rather unfunny generalising about German society. As lazy national stereotyping goes it’s all fairly innocuous and good-natured (‘your German’, as Jerome somewhat unfortunately and indeed repeatedly has it, is law-abiding and efficient, but perhaps over-deferential to authority; all that sort of thing) and there was nothing here to seriously offend my delicate 21st century sensibilities. Still, it’s quite a big part of the book, and soon became more than slightly tedious. The real problem with Jerome’s humorous essaying on Germany is that most of it isn’t funny; in a comic novel this is surely the worst offence of all. To be fair, he depicts the English abroad in equally hackneyed fashion, though I’m not convinced that improves matters.

He was, nonetheless, an unusually nimble prose stylist, at his best every inch the equal of Wodehouse, whom he clearly influenced, and his playfully digressive narrative voice is the best thing about this book. At the end of it (don’t worry, this isn’t a plot spoiler, for the very good reason that there is no plot) he claims that a bummel is a rambling and pleasant journey, short or long, without an end. I haven’t the faintest, but it’s certainly a pretty neat metaphor for the way he wrote.

This is a flawed and curious outing, to be sure. I was alternately amused and irritated by it, and sometimes I was both simultaneously. A collection of sketches in search of a structure, it lacks the satisfying formal completeness of Boat, but is by no means the complete dud some have claimed. Jerome’s sweeping observations on national identity have dated embarrassingly, while his wonderfully funny sideswipes at advertising and cycling fads - including a super-duper ergonomic saddle which is excruciatingly uncomfortable - seem bang up-to-date. It’s a bumpy ride but, during the more rewarding stretches of the trip, the present reader was left in no doubt that his genial tour guide was a comic master of the first order. ( )

A capable light travelogue that fails to recapture the magic of its predecessor, Three Men in a Boat. In Three Men on the Bummel, Jerome K. Jerome revives his two friends from the Boat journey and takes them to Germany, but where the Thames of the first book came through vividly and generously, Bummel's Black Forest does not. We don't arrive in Germany until 80 pages in, and when we do there's no organisation, no real difference on the page between Stuttgart and Dresden and Hanover. There's a general sense of Germanness – beer, Alpine views, strict policemen – but not enough to satisfy.

There is plenty that still appeals: Jerome can still deliver a dry and amusing anecdote about his friends, and his general observations are still funny: "At the end of each bridge stands a policeman to tell the German how to cross it. Were there no policeman there, he would probably sit down and wait till the river had passed by" (pg. 197). In the humour there's a lot of truth, not only in the German deference to petty authority but also in the influence of the travelling Englishman: it was not Shakespeare or Milton who spread the English language throughout the world, Jerome says, but "the Englishman who, unable or unwilling to learn a single word of any language but his own, travels purse in hand into every corner of the Continent… For him it is that every foreign hotel- and restaurant-keeper adds to his advertisement: 'Only those with fair knowledge of English need apply.'" (pg. 165).

With such light and clever content in its pages, Bummel remains a fun and inoffensive read. A 'bummel', after all – Jerome informs us – is a journey where "the only thing regulating it being the necessity of getting back within a given time to the point from which one started", and to have "a pleasant time, and [be] sorry when 'tis over" (pg. 207). That's all Three Men on the Bummel tries to do, and it does it well. It would be perhaps ungrateful to expect it to also recreate the improbable success that was Three Men in a Boat. ( )

Not as good as the first one but still entertaining. Some paragraph is so boring that I fell asleep instantly. ( )

We enjoyed this little bummel. A lot of good laughs! One cringe worthy part, blessedly brief. A fine wit and an excellent narrator. ( )

Almost as good as the men in the boat. I laughed out loud at these old jokes. And the married former bachelors. ( )