Having had quite a few narrow boat holidays on canals and enough inland sailing to be suitably terrified by the description of taking their narrow boat across the Chanel, I was able to enjoy the fears from an armchair. You'll gain almost nothing informative in navigating, steering, managing locks, planning or coping with narrowboat life or travel by reading this book; Terry seems to assume you'll either know about this, or you really can't be interested. The humour is there in bucket loads, but I think you have to be English to understand it and even then there is no certainty that you will. Aliens, trolls, gongoozlers, killer fish, and the walking dead all stand between our two-person, one-whippet crew and their goal: the ancient, many-towered city of Carcassonne.

You go rabbiting in Oxfordshire, tie up among the bankers in the City of London, live among history in Flanders, drift through Champagne, throw a rope around the Eiffel Tower, struggle with hostile life forms in Burgundy, float down the Saone from vineyard to vineyard, get swept along by the terrible Rhone from Lyon to Avignon, dip your toes in the Mediterranean, and sail across inland seas among the flamingos of the Camargue. Despite developing a kind of mild dislike for the author who, I seem to think, used to be in advertising or PR or something similar, this was an interesting story.As soon as I began reading it, I realised my aunt would give up - since the complete absence of quotation marks makes the reading of it confusing. Before picking up Carcassone I was a bit worried by the negative reviews which focused on the writing style but having leapt gazelle-like over the very first place where ordinarily there should have been quote marks I gambolled on without further worry. I don't think there is a Woolworths in Bewdley, said Clive, but if there is I can pick up a CD of Felix Mendelssohn and his Hawaiian Serenaders. In 3 days at a conference overlooking the narrowboats on the Llangollen Canal I have nagged every one of my friends and other delegates to read it too.

While the thesis for this book was an English narrowboat (canal boat) taken down England, across the channel, into Belgium, and then to the south of France, the actual amount of material devoted to boating or canal details could have been summed up in less than 15 pages. Take one story about low flying fighter planes: the first description had them just 6 inches above the Rhone. I think this is what prevents his book becoming a classic - the reader, or at least myself, never comes completely emotionally immersed in the story - how Terry and Monica cope, or their relationship with each other, or indeed their relationship with all the characters that make their brief appearances. Funnily enough the English Channel can get rough, with waves big enough to sink a narrow boat very quickly. Aside from the commentary about daily life in France, the challenges of taking a narrow boat outside it's usual habitat and the quirky boating community, I particularly enjoyed the author's meditations on how history lives on.Terry Darlington was brought up in Pembroke Dock, Wales, during the war, between a flying-boat base and an oil terminal. The story of a man, his wife and his whippet who sail their narrowboat from the Midlands to the South of France including a Channel crossing would be interesting however written but the main selling point is the author's sense of humour. It's described (as can be seen from the cover above) with words like "classic" and "comic" on the lines (I guess) of Three Men in a Boat or Bill Bryson's travel books, and some reviews are 5 star raves. It was a little difficult to keep up with the narrative at times because there was so much information and a labyrinth of digressions but what I did follow was enjoyable and at times quite amusing.

Then there's the writing style: this should be an easy read, yet too often it isn't, with prose like poetry (or poetry like prose), fantasies and at one point switching to the current tense. They don’t know much about boats, except have to steer, and definitely nothing about the mechanics of boat engines. I read this books for my book group out of 10 of us only 2 had finished it and normally we have all completed the book, clearly I was not the only one to who's enthusiasm ran out. Like Estuary ( reviewed earlier) I sort of enjoyed this book, but there were significant qualifications. You meet the French nobody meets – poets, captains, historians, drunks, bargees, men with guns, scholars, madmen – they all want to know the people on the painted boat and their narrow dog.It has also reached the heart of a daughter-in-law who has lurchers - the big version of the dog in the story. I don't really know any of the places in France so a bot more background information would have made it more enjoyable. When they retired Terry and Monica Darlington decided to sail their canal narrowboat across the Channel and down to the Mediterranean, together with their whippet Jim.