The peculiarity of the book by Jerom is in its truthfulness. The author tells it to the reader in the preface to the first edition. The book itself has a special kind of composition: all chapters of it are practically separate stories, telling us about those events that have ever happened to the four main characters. They are George, Harris, the narrator himself and their dog Montmorency. But at the same time the book has main line, which unites all the chapters – the friends are travelling along the Thames.
This book can be surely treated as a humorous one, but it often shows us the naked truth, and makes the reader think about the things he has never thought about at all.
A man who’s fond of making fuss and fidgeting will be pleased to read an extract about Uncle Podger. Fortunately, the author describes the process of hanging a portrait on the wall in full detail.
A man who’s keen on boasting should read that episode, when the narrator is in the pub, where a huge trout stands in a glass-box on the shelf. And every new fisherman who comes into the pub tells him his own story of catching that incredible fish. But actually, when the narrator suddenly bumps into the box, the thing is broken into thousands of pieces – the fish is made of plaster!
So this way the author mildly draws our attention to the drawbacks of people’s character. The humour of the book is very lively, and not at all offensive.

STYLISTIC DEVICES:
(Personification). I did get to sleep for a few hours, and then some part of the boat which seemed to have grown up in the night — for it certainly was not there when we started, and it had disappeared by the morning — kept digging into my spine.
(Syntactical parallelism).
Then a sweet young lady entered, leading a meek-looking little fox-terrier, and left him, chained up there, between the bull-dog and the poodle. He sat and looked about him for a minute. Then he cast up his eyes to the ceiling, and seemed, judging from his expression, to be thinking of his mother. Then he yawned. Then he looked round at the other dogs, all silent, grave, and dignified.
He looked at the bull-dog, sleeping dreamlessly on his right. He looked at the poodle, erect and haughty, on his left. Then, without a word of warning, without the shadow of a provocation, he bit that poodle’s near fore-leg, and a yelp of agony rang through the quiet shades of that lobby.
This book is related to the genre “fiction”, so it is full of epithets. [Collocations-real epithets].
Disreputable dogs
Gigantic arrangements
And George laughed — one of those irritating, senseless, chuckle-headed, crack-jawed laughs of his. They do make me so wild.
Meek-looking little fox-terrier
Silent, grave, dignified dogs
(Word choice). I still went on pulling, however, and still no lock came in sight, and the river grew more and more gloomy and mysterious under the gathering shadows of night, and things seemed to be getting weird and uncanny. I thought of hobgoblins and banshees, and will-o’-the-wisps, and those wicked girls who sit up all night on rocks, and lure people into whirl-pools and things; and I wished I had been a better man, and knew more hymns.