An ancient river. The journey upstream of some impressionable young men into a mysterious challenging interior. An inevitable reckoning at the source. Finally the terrible return to reality. Here surely is pre-Edwardian English fiction at its classic finest.But this is not Heart of Darkness and the river is not the Congo. Actually it's the Thames and the narrator is not Marlow but J or Jerome K Jerome. Published in 1889 10 years before Conrad's novel Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) is one of the comic gems in the English language. An accidental one too. "I did not intend to write a funny book at first" said its author.-The Guardian