All too often it reverts to Daily Mail stereotypes of aren't the French odd, do lets remember the war, bash the EU and complain about not getting beer in pint glasses. When they retired, Terry Darlington and his somewhat saner wife Monica--together with their dog, a whippet named Jim--chucked their earthbound life and set out in an utterly unseaworthy sixty-foot canal narrowboat across the notoriously treacherous English Channel and down to the South of France. It's lovely to read, and much more fun than Bill Bryson, but you HAVE to imagine Terry Darlington speaking to you across the kitchen table, doing impressions of French people and singing and quoting Rimbaud at you, otherwise you're missing out on half the book and what you ARE reading doesn't always make sense. I found no problem with the writing style at all, it's always pretty obvious who's saying what to whom, absence of quotation marks notwithstanding. 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.

Written with the author’s glorious sense of humor, this is one of those journeys you never want to end. His writing remains unformed and discursive; as someone else noted in the Goodreads review and is revealed in an interview transcript, the style is a kind of "stream of consciousness" effect. 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.Great adventure I dont deny but the writing style is more challenging at times, rambling, jumping and at times so off piste you have to double back to check you have not missed a page.

But one day we found a boatyard we could trust and soon we sailed away, in shining grey and white and crimson, with primroses on the roof and a brass tunnel light at the bow, and our names on the engine-room in fairground lettering a foot high, and ran into the first bridge. There was so much information on each page that I felt my head spinning, as it was a lot to process! The punctuation and sentence structure is actually very clever, giving a stream of consciousness style to the whole piece.My recommendation is if you're interested, maybe a canal boat owner, then try out the first couple of paragraphs or maybe even chapters and see how much you enjoy the viewpoint and writing style. 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 have tootled along the gentle canals of the UK, and come up with the idea of crossing the channel and going down the French canals and the Rhone to Carcassonne in the South. I felt this all through the book, but couldn't quite put my finger on it, and then discovered on finishing the tale that he'd penned a little postscript pointing to all the literary allusions and quotations he'd peppered the book with. If you are interested in canal/boating life as well as a bit of a voyage - and/or you are interested in th culture of France - I think this book is for you.

Last year I read The Narrowboat Summer and was delighted with it and the wonderful relaxing sense of moving slowly down a canal in a narrow boat. I don't really know any of the places in France so a bot more background information would have made it more enjoyable. Mildly entertaining and somewhat informative (if you are planning a trip to France in a narrowboat) it never really grabbed my attention. Following the publication of Narrow Dog to Carcassonne , Terry, his wife Monica, and their whippet Jim planned to sail the Phyllis May down the Intracoastal Waterway from Virginia to Florida--an adventure which, should they survive it, will be the subject of their next book, Narrow Dog to Indian River , coming from Delta in 2009.

There were many frightening moments, when they donned life jackets, clutched passports and the CD of Terry’s book and said goodbye to Jim. 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. Carcassone isn't difficult to get into if you permit yourself the same sense of humour that drove the writing. He's clearly a well-read man and at times you could almost describe his style as 'stream of consciousness' but ultimately unless, like me, you share his love of canals and boating, running, beer and France, and appreciate his sense of humour, you are unlikely to enjoy this book. The lady on the barge tied up to his boat kills herself one night, quite a distressing episode, you'd think, yet it just becomes a small and equal part with the rest of his account, the interesting and the mundane.

It is accepted by you that Daunt Books has no control over additional charges in relation to customs clearance. I like the genre of travel writing because it really takes me away from the diurnal details of my life and make me dream of being in other places without the annoyances and irritations of actual travel so this was quite fun and even got me thinking about narrow boats in the future, though I might find negotiating and navigating the locks a bit difficult in practice. You'll visit the France nobody knows--the backwaters of Flanders, the canals beneath Paris, and the forbidden routes to the wine-dark Mediterranean Sea. You hear Darlington's voice as you read -- although in this case the voice I heard was the wrong one: I'd read that he was born in Wales and imagined him speaking in a Swansea brogue, only to dig up a Youtube interview when I was about 50 pages from the end and discovered he actually speaks in RP. Clive, I said, you come from Dudley, you have been to sea once and you nearly didn't come back, and now you want to put at hazard the December years I could spend in the Star or watching Kylie Minogue on the box.

His language and descriptions bring to life - the many interesting and possibly slightly exaggerated interactions he had. They love every living creature to a rapture unless you are small and furry and trying to get the hell out of here. Breakdowns, floods, accidents, hangovers, vandals, dicks, trolls, aliens, gongoozlers, killer fish and the walking dead stand between our intrepid crew and their goal – many-towered Carcassonne. I find Terry's descriptions of the scenes he encounters, the dry humour he sees in the world around him, including the dog, fantastic reading. Terry Darlington was brought up in Pembroke Dock, Wales, during the war, between a flying-boat base and an oil terminal.