Mungo Park's journey by a spinner of legend It is easy to lament that the great tide of knowledge has robbed us of fantasy. We mourn that we can no longer dream of half-formed terrors in darkest Africa, of creatures that inhabit the moon, of an utopia across the seas, that whatever terrestrial mysteries remain are the province of scientists and Steven Spielberg. Water Music is a brisk slap across the face of such sentiment, for this busy novel is a wry and unsentimental look at a golden age of exploration, when ill-equipped white men with little more than a burning desire to find something Herodotus or another classicist had described, ventured into unknown realms. Questing for the Holy Grail of knowledge, leaving wives, families and mundane responsibilities in their wake, they plunged into the unknown, seldom to return alive. What is a woman that you forsake her And the hearth fire and the home-acre To go with the old grey widow-maker? Boyle's answer: because Home is either too boring or, too wretched to provide a convivial life; for a gentleman of intellect, taste and curiosity. Mungo Park would certainly be pleased to hear himself so described. Park is the inquisitive Scotsman whose wanderlust leads him on an amusing and terrifying African quest that makes Tam O'Shanter's ordeal seem no more distressing than a temperance lecture from a Free Kirk elder. Boyle is a spinner of legend. This is a work that can aptly be called an Odyssey. Water Music's vast structure, coupled with the epic voyages of Mungo Park, provide the Homeric skeleton; Boyle's vivid descriptions of life in London smack of Boccacio and Rabelais. He takes Dickens's London and looks at if from the eyes of would-be rake Ned Rise; we live and lust with the mutilated gamin whose life provides Water Music's principal :subplot. Stripped of Dickensian pathos, the prose is as luminous as a newly-restored Caravaggio. Despite the attraction of Rise's escapades, it is ,he African passages that really establish Boyle's skill as a writer. He is such a master of word pictures that you can taste the dust of a hundred camels, feel terror at the desert chieftain who's about to grind out Mungo's eyes, taste the tart, cool glory of native beer, feel the dwarfing sweep of the river Niger. Boyle's supporting cast is marvelously etched. There is Mungo's lady of the hearth fire and homeacre, an inquisitive woman of science awaiting her betrothed's return so she can avoid wedding the local muffin. Resigned to losing her husband, she lives to see Africa swallow her father-worshipping son. There is Johnson the guide, an American slave brought to England to become a gentleman of great expectations, who flees to Africa after winning a duel with a man who had the gall to imply he was black. There are Ned's whorish sidekicks Sally Sebum and Nell Punt, as artfully drawn a pair as to be found in any of the great novels of our language. Water Music is vastly impressive and entertaining, the most original and provocative novel by a beginning beginning writer that I have read. It deserves to win a place in history equal to its musical namesake.
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