A crazed humorist's wild-and-wooly romp
Shaun O'Connell
Boston Sun 2/14/82

"Water Music" does for fiction what "Raiders of the Lost Ark" did or film. Through intricately plotted, wild-and-woolly romps, both seek to restore vitality to their forms. These works return us to the picaresque excitements of early novels and the cliff-hanging thrills-and-chills of early movies. Both depend upon exotic settings, contrived chases, narrow escapes, harmless violence, amazing rescues and formal allusions. (As one of Boyle's characters puts it: "Hey, this Is Africa, man. The eye of the needle, mother of mystery, heart of darkness." A land of book titles.) Neither novel nor film claims high seriousness; they exist for the fun of it. Each, too, is quite successful at accomplishing what it sets out to do. Only a grouch might ask for more, or less, than what they offer.

"Water Music" tells the tall tale of Mungo Park (1771-1806), African explorer, and Ned Rise, London hustler. After the fashion of Coover and Doctorow, Boyle puts an actual historical character through partly imaginary paces, in scary places, with fictional beings: Rise and a cast of thousands, hired to play whores and hangmen, cutpurses and cannibals, villains and virgins. As in Pynchon's "V," scenes alternate between hero and anti-hero—Park beats the African bush, seeking the source of the Niger, while Rise beats the London streets, seeking the source of his next meal—until the two characters join in a Great Quest.

Here, as in his wild stories ("Descent of Man"), Boyle is an adept plotter, a crazed humorist and a fierce describer. Like the devious Niger, the novel loops, twists, slides into asides, then cascades into open waters; It reads like a roller-coaster ride and ends in a splash. It is, too, often quite funny, in a gross sort of way. I particularly liked his recipe for Baked Camel (serves 400), which begins with a practical suggestion ("dig trench") and ends with a dining tip ("serve with rice"). The mating of Park, the "albino infidel," with Princess Fatima (382 lb.) also has its kinky kick. Even the Loch Ness monster makes a comic cameo appearance as a voyeur.

However. Boyle is at the top of his game as a rococo prose monger with a nose for the grotesque. The day of Ned Rise's trial "dawned like an infection, the sky low and pus-colored, the sun like a crusted eye." Meanwhile, In Africa "a hyrax screeches from its perch, leopards cough." Boyle's prose world is elaborate, artificial—"doom-babadoom" go the African drums, just as they did in Tarzan movies—and invested with elaborately wrought embellishments.

All of this and more. "Water Music"—like the fiction of Coover and Gass, fabulists who praise it—is, finally, most about the energy of its own contriving. A world of words. Its title, as Gass notes, echoes other works (by Handel and Joyce), but the novel never directs us out of such literary labyrinths, toward life as it was ever lived. It is a novel that uses itself up in the telling; like a box-of popcorn, it is a self-consuming artifact.

Rise survives, and Park does not, but that hardly seems to matter, for they only "live" anyway within the artifice of Boyle's imagination. What does all their yuk and fritter mean? What values are at stake deep to the heart of darkness? As long as the show goes on—and Boyle puts on a dandy show—no one may ask, but after the performance some grouch might quibble that more is sometimes less.