Wild, Dark Novel In Grand Manner, A Bravura Performance "At an agewhen most young Scotsmen were lifting skirts, plowing furrows and spreading seed, Mungo Park was displaying his bare buttocks to Al-haj Abi Ibn Fatoudi Emir of Ludamar. The year was 1795. George III was dabbing the walls of Windsor Castle with his own spittle, the Notables were botching things in France, Goya was deaf, DeQuincy a depraves adolescent. George Bryar 'Beau' Brummel was smoothing his first starched collar, young Ludwig Van Beethoven, beetle browed and 24, was wowing them in Vienna with his Piano Concerto No. 2." Clearly, a bravura performance is being announced in the overture of T.C. Boyle's marvelous novel "Water Music"—a picaresque panorama of the true pustulence and madness of the classical age. But that opening paragraph doesn't begin to suggest the wild, dark majesty of the novel. In fact, the current of American fiction has been rushing toward this novel for 20 years. The old metaphor that goes back to Ancient Rome, at least, has it that writers sit on the shoulders of giants which makes Western culture sound like a circus acrobatic stunt (''The Living Totem Pole," perhaps). But Boyle's book would have been impossible without the behemoth, irreverent explosions of the picaresque from American fiction's left wing--Pynchon's "V" and "Gravity's Rainbow" and, especially, John Barth's "The. Sot-Weed Factor." But Boyle has learned the tragic lesson of post-Joycean comic fiction—readership is the going price of genius. The farther a writer ventures into the jungles of parodistic and semantic virtuosity, the more readers he may lose back at the trading post. And if a writer falls in the forest, he doesn't make a sound if there's no one there to hear it. "Water Music," for all its verbal brilliance, erects no barrier of words between reader and tale. As William H. Gass so accurately puts it in the dustflap blurb, it has the natural linguistic lilt of the Irish baroque. T. 'Coraghessan Boyle's very name seems so full of blarney that it sounds like a barroom rumor in some beer-sozzled scene by Sean O'Casey. Boyle is a young writer who lives in Los Angeles and who has previously published only one book, a story collection called "The Descent of Man." Nothing quite prepared anyone for this grand, fourmovement symphonic suite of comedy, melodrama, mayhem, ribaldry and adventure. It is Geographical Romance. Boyle's hero is Mungo Park, the very real Scottish explorer who was the first white European to set haunches and splash around in the Niger River. Unlike most African explorers, said one historian, Mungo Park was lucky enough to "rejoice in an unforgettable name." Boyle appropriates much from Park's own narrative. But as Boyle rebuilds Park out of equal parts yearning and naiveté, Park first travels his sacred river like some hard luck Huck Finn. He even has his Jim—in this case a black wiseguy companion-guide named Johnson, an African Sancho Panza with a taste for Shakespeare. The profane counter-melody to the expansive "Water Music" of Mungo Park is the career of Ned Rise, as sure a victim there could be of what Machiavelli called "fortune's great and steady malice." "Not Twist, not Copperfield, not Fagin himself had a childhood to compare with Ned Rise's. lie was unwashed, untutored, unloved, battered, abused, harassed, deprived, starved, mutilated and orphaned ... His was a childhood so totally depraved even a Zola would shudder to think of it." Adulthood, for Ned Rise, isn't much better. He does everything from concoct live sex shows to sell putrid, phony caviar cleverly called "Chichikov's Choice" (one of Boyle's infrequent literary inside jokes, named after the demonic focus of Gogol's "Dead Souls"). Boyle ping-pongs back and forth between the worlds of Park and Rise, between the oozy horrors, exotic ecstasies and exquisite terrors of Africa and the disease-ridden, class-ridden rot and muck of London in the late-classical era--a perfumed sewer from which once sprang Johnson and Pope. Boyle's narrative cruise can be erotic, wildly funny and exciting, by turns, without slowing things down one whit. Even the digressions are mesmerizing. And that, finally, is what makes this sly and superbly knowing geographical romance so magical. Boyle has pulled off the trick no American may yet have done, the trick only Gabriel Garcia Marquez had done before in "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and perhaps John Fowles had done in "The French Lieutenant's Woman."
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