It is one thing to suffer the hardships of travel in order to get a glimpse of the unknown and the exotic. But for Hart Massey – architect, metalworker, son of a Governor General, and belatedly a literary bargee – hardship seems to be an end in itself.

In The Leaky Iron Boat, his second book about the painfully slow progress that can be made along the listless backwaters of Western Europe, the 70-something Massey celebrates an existence that is both dreary and full of complaint. His 60-foot barge, named Lionel, is forever springing leaks, repair work is often incompetent and almost always overpriced, Belgian canals are horribly polluted, other barge operators are thoughtless and careless, canal locks are badly designed, the Clos Vougeot ’82 isn’t what it should be. As a form of masochistic travel, barging through canals seems easily the equal of a trip up the Amazon, but Massey is not a congenial enough companion to make the torments worthwhile.

His aimless and staccato narrative of various trips taken between 1982 and 1991 is almost entirely without humour, passion, or introspection, all qualities that would have helped this sour and repressed tale. He is remarkably critical of his wife, Melodie, who is chided for her caution or incompetence until she finally declares after eight years of this narrow existence that she’s had enough. Though she is his constant companion on these tense journeys, we know little about her by the end.

As self-centred and pompous as Massey seems to be – the low point comes when he describes his disappointment at missing a glimpse of a nursing mother’s nipple, then critiques her diapering arrangements – we don’t actually learn much about him either. A passing reference to driving his father home from a 1937 League of Nations meeting is about all there is of Massey family history, which has to be more interesting than the endless accounts of awkward places to moor. His own life apart, he is almost always more comfortable with the past than the present (though Napoleon III clearly fails to meet his standards). Descriptions of the real world beyond the canal are muted and largely impersonal. Happiest in his self-imposed confinement, Massey is a most reluctant storyteller.