Water Music (The Penguin Contemporary American Fiction Series) (Paperback)

by T.C. Boyle (Author), James R. Kincaid (Contributor) "At an age when most young Scotsmen were lifting skirts, plowing furrows and spreading seed..." (more)
Key Phrases: geographical missionaries, blue ass, young prig, Ned Rise, Sir Joseph, Mungo Park (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
T.C. Boyle’s riotous first novel—now in a new edition for its 25th anniversary

Twenty five years ago, T.C. Boyle published his first novel, Water Music—a funny, bawdy, extremely entertaining novel of imaginative and stylistic fancy that announced to the world Boyle’s tremendous gifts as a storyteller. Set in the late eighteenth century, Water Music follows the wild adventures of Ned Rise, thief and whoremaster, and Mungo Park, a Scottish explorer, through London’s seamy gutters and Scotland’s scenic highlands—to their grand meeting in the heart of darkest Africa. There they join forces and wend their hilarious way to the source of the Niger.

From the Back Cover
"Ribald, hilarious, exotic—an engrossing flight of the literary imagination."
—Los Angeles Times

"Water Music does for fiction what Raiders of the Lost Ark did for film. . . . Boyle is an adept plotter, a crazed humorist, and a fierce describer."
—The Boston Globe

"High comic fiction . . . Boyle is a writer of considerable talent. He pulls off his most implausible inventions with wit, a perfect sense of timing, and his considerable linguistic gifts."
—The Washington Post

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Product Details

• Paperback: 464 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics); 25 Rep Anv edition (July 28, 1983)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0140065504
• ISBN-13: 978-0140065503
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (32 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #221,201 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This book explodes with rich characters and adventure!, November 17, 1999

By	Janice M. Hansen (California United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

TC Boyle challenges the reader to "hold on" through the chapters as you race along the rivers and lives of this story. I was enchanted, humored. frightened, anxious and enriched with this experience. Not only did I burn out quite a few flashlight batteries reading late into the night trying not to disturb my husband, but realized I needed to find a more advanced dictionary/thesaurus to keep up with Mr. Boyle's remarkable command of vocabulary. Great fun!

24 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Travel account, picaresque or novel of manners?, June 10, 2001

By	Carool Kersten - See all my reviews

Revolving around the expeditions of Mungo Park, T. Coraghessan Boyle's novel Water Music is not easy to categorize; it is a travel account, picaresque and novel of manners rolled into one.

In 1795 the Scotsman Mungo Park (1771-1806) went to Africa to explore the Niger, a river no European had ever seen. Upon arriving in present-day Gambia, he went 200 miles up the Gambia River to the trading station at Pisania and then traveled east into unexplored territory. In 1796 he reached the Niger River at the town of Segu and traveled 80 miles downstream before his supplies were exhausted and he had to turn back. He returned to Africa in 1805, intending to explore the Niger from Segu to its mouth. His expedition was attacked at Bussa, and Park was drowned. Dedicating the book to the (fictive) Raconteurs' Club, master storyteller T.C. Boyle has concocted an ingenious narrative. At first he spins numerous strands, weaving them into an intricate exotic literary tapestry, as the tale progresses. In fact, the 104 chapters can be read as short stories in their own right. Their titles are sometimes alluding to literary masterpieces by such figures as Ivan Turgeniev, Joseph Conrad and Langston Hughes.

Boyle's story starts in the year 1795. Mungo Park is held hostage by Ali Ibn Fatoudi, the Emir of Ludamar, one of the inland Muslim principalities in what is now the Sahel. A protégé Joseph Banks, erstwhile companion of Captain Cook on his circumnavigation of the globe and now President of the Royal Society and Director of the African Association for Promoting Exploration, Park, a former surgeon on an East India merchantman, has been selected to lead the first expedition in search of the river Niger.

Mungo's guide and interpreter is the intriguing Johnson a.k.a. Katunga Oyo. The early biography of this Madingo is reminiscent of the adventures of a character from Maryse Conde. Kidnapped and sold into slavery Katunga Oyo is shipped to a plantation in England's new world colony of South Carolina. After a visit to his overseas possessions the landowner takes him to London. Here Johnson, as he is now called, learns to read and write, and develops a passion for literature, becoming a "true-blue African homme des lettres". After killing a man in a duel, Johnson ends up back in Africa. Here he "melted into the black bank of the jungle". Johnson's idiom is full of - often humorous - anachronisms. He is calling the local cuisine "soul food" and his old plantation songs "the blues". He is capable of self-mockery: "Don't look at me, brother. I'm an animist." Sometimes he sounds like a 18th century Muddy Waters. Oscillating between his African heritage and newly acquired European culture, he manages to graft the latter upon his African roots. Johnson becomes a shaman of sorts: At the behest of his former master, who happens to be a member of Sir Joseph's Association, Johnson agrees to join Mungo Park's 1795 expedition. His price: the complete works of William Shakespeare.

Ned Rise, a pauper from the London underworld, son of an alcoholic hag, `not Twist, not Copperfield, not Fagin himself had a childhood to compare to Ned Rise's'. Through a twist of fate, this impresario of live sex shows avant la lettre, corpse digger and convicted murderer ends up at Fort Goree, just off the Coast of Senegal. Here, at this `gateway to the Niger and bastion of rot' he is drafted into the Royal African Corps and selected to accompany Park on his fateful second expedition into the African interior. Because of his sublime survival instinct he is very able to tune in with his environment Consequently, Ned Rise appears to be better suited to establish a rapport with the natives than Africa-veteran Park.

Water Music is more than a travel account. Although it is clear that Boyle has researched his subject meticulously, he is not interested in a mere historically correct chronicle of events as has explained in his introduction.

But Boyle does address the issue of the objective of travel-writing seriously. In this respect, it is interesting to see how Mungo Park's own view on his mission evolves in the course of his first journey; the cool observer of the flora and fauna in Sumatra is giving way to the romantic. Held at the court of Ibn Fatoudi Park resolves to make his findings known to the world.ý

After an audience with Mansong, ruler of Bambarra, there is a amazing twist. Reading a page from Park's notebook, Johnson notices that the explorer's recording of the meeting is not only inaccurate, but embellishing it beyond recognition. Johnson reproaches Park for this.

It seems as if the tables have turned; the African - `the object of study' - demanding accuracy, wanting it `guts and all'. But who is speaking here, and what is his motivation? Is it the intellectual Johnson defending the great cause of science? Or is it the up-rooted Mandingo Katunga Oyo, who wants Africa depicted in all its bizarre horror, motivated by self-hate? Why, on the other hand, does the scholar-explorer Mungo Park want to embellish and cover up? Does he intend to create an image of the `noble savage'? (After all, this is the age of Jean-Jeacques Rousseau). It leaves the reader with questions: how are travel accounts to be read and interpreted? Can a travel-writer's intentions be discerned? And can his account be trusted?

The author addresses here an important issue because it goes to the core of travel-writing. Is it possible at all to represent the reality of other cultures? It also raises questions concerning the intertwining of fact and fiction; the imaging of cultures. Water Music is multi-layered; although not an explicit critique of imperialism and although the author does not allow himself to be restrained by ideological shackles, there are implied, ironic observations.

Neither does Boyle ignore the culture clash that is occurring within Africa itself between the Muslims, often North-Africans of Arab descent, and the indigenous population of western and equatorial Africa, which is largely animist. The latter are but despicable infidels to the `Moors', who, usually having the political upper hand, prosecute them relentlessly, retaining or selling them as slaves. It is, incidentally, this conflict which forms a central theme in Condé's earlier mentioned novel Segou. It would be interesting to discover whether Condé has read, and was influenced by, Water Music.

But Boyle's main preoccupation is with Mungo Park, the man. In an interview he has explained that, when ýýdoing research for his thesis on 19th century English literature, he came upon Mungo Park in a book by Pre-Rafaelite poet John Ruskin (1819-1900). Further investigation learned that Ruskin's terrific hero appeared to be rather common. What fascinated Boyle was how this seemingly ordinary man came to chase a dream. To abandoned his family and embark on a crazy adventure only to die miserably in the jungle. During the second expedition, He lets Ned Rise also muse upon Mungo Park's insane, relentless push into the interior.

Like all good travel-writing Water Music is about two journeys: into the interior of Africa and into the interior of the self, the true heart of darkness.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An absolutely tremendous book. Buy this for your friends!, September 3, 2000

By	R. Peterson "International citizen" (This month? In Tbilisi, Georgia (Former Soviet Republic)) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Boyle, one of my favorite authors, is a black-humored satirist. His books are usually based on historical events and people, but that's where the reality usually ends. Water Music is ostensibly about the "discovery" of the Niger River by a Scotsman named Mungo Park in the late 1700s. In actuality, the book follows the parallel lives of the fictional "Ned Rise", a Dickensian sort of sleazebag and smalltime thief, and Mungo Park, a renaissance man of sorts whose travels and yearnings take him back and forth from Africa to Europe more regularly than his family wishes. The book, arranged in blocks of flashbacks and essays rather than formal chapters, is sprinkled with all of the other quirky historical events that occurred at the time of this story. Boyle, whose short fictions I have also enjoyed in The New Yorker, tells a story that reaches all of the senses, and his books are a mess of smells, tastes, sights, and sounds, not to mention an open door on the raw sexual and animal side of humankind. Like Roahl Dahl (author of such children's stories as Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, and James and the Giant Peach), Boyle's protagonists always seem to end up where and how they should, the bastard always seems to get what he deserves... which is rich and satisfying for as emotional a reader as I am. i always have 3-4 copies on my shelves to give out to friends who haven't read it.