A ribald, sprawling yarn spun from the African quests of a Scottish adventurer There really was a Mungo Park. He was a Scotsman born in 1771 who became a surgeon with the East India Co. and was then sent by African Assn. of London to explore the Niger River in an Africa that had still only been nibbled at by the colonial powers. After many a hair's-breadth escape, Park made it back to England and published "Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa" in 1799. He returned to Africa again in 1805 to trace the Niger to its source and this time he stayed, the hard way. Using Park and his career as a sort of creative pedestal, T. Coraghessan Boyle—Tom Boyle to his friends and his students at USC—has carved, spun, erected, conjured up, dreamt, frosted and festooned a dark and sprawling, ribald, hilarious, cruel, language-intoxicated, exotic and original novel called "Water Music," a title to acknowledge both Park's London contemporary, Handel, and the river; the story's principal setting and symbol. Boyle's first book was collection of short stories, "Descent of Man." It was widely praised and Boyle received two literary prizes, the St. Lawrence Award for Short Fiction and the Aga Khan Award. This is his first novel, and I will not be surprised if it takes its share of honors because this is a fine and engrossing flight of the literary imagination. Whatever Park was in life, and I expect we should all dig out S. L. Gwynn's "Mungo Park and the Quest of the Niger" (1934), Boyle makes him courageous, headstrong, stubborn, ever so slightly pompous, dangerously patronizing of the natives—and possibly not brilliant, intellectually speaking. God's fool, perhaps, or simply a symbolic carrier of white man's clumsy and burdensome attempts to commandeer a continent he had not really bothered to understand. Boyle surrounds Park with a remarkable set of supporting characters, chief among these Ned Rise, a born survivor from the gin-drenched depths of the late Hogarthian/early Dickensian London. Rise has lost fingertips for thieving; he puts on sex shows in taverns for gentlemen idlers, doctors overripe fish eggs to sell as caviar and, at the verge of each big killing, becomes the cheater cheated, or even the honest man done wrong. Rise's falling lifeline converges with Park's in Africa and they march together to their several destinies. There is as well the not-soon-to-be-forgotten Fatima, queen to a villainous Moorish chieftain and the size and weight of a Jeep. Boyle sets the scene well: "She is gargantuan, elephantine, her great bundled turban and glowing jubbah like a pair of circus tents, her shadow leaping and swelling in the uncertain light until it engulfs the room. Her attendants—two girls in billowy pantaloons and a hoary old woman—sit at her feet like olives flanking a cantaloupe in a surreal still life." She soils Park's virtue, but saves his life. Johnson, a native guide, has his own links to the old country, and part of the fee he demands for joining the second expedition is an autographed edition of the works of Alexander Pope. Nan Punt and Sally Sebum are Ned's dearest bawds and colleagues in the gin game. Nelson Smirke ("he looks like nothing so much as a colossal turnip") is a tavern-keeper undone by Ned and himself sentenced to Africa. Ailee Anderson Is Park's not-endlessly-patient betrothed, who much later has a curious encounter on Loch Ness. Alexander, or Zander, is her brother, another victim of the African enthusiasm. The innocent Fanny Brunch, a victim of love, wanders briefly through the tale like a lost angel. The prose is ever more than a convenience: It is a presence, a litany, a symphony of words, a chorale of idioms ancient and modern, a treasury of strange and wondrous place names, a glossary of things, good food and horrendous ills. Of the West Coast of Africa late in the 18th Century: "Spotted fever, yaws, typhus and trypanosomiasis throve here. Hookworm. cholera and plague. There was bilharzia and guinea worm in the drinking water, hydrophobia in the sharp incisors of bats and wolves, filariasis in the saliva of mosquitoes and horseflies. . . bacilli, spirilla and cocci, viruses, fungi, nematodes, trematodes and amoebae-all eating away at your marrow and organs. blurring your vision, sapping your fiber, eradicating your memory as neatly as an eraser moving over the scribbled wisdom of a blackboard." There is invention to match the mountains of words—failed hangings, incisions by crocodile, grave-robbings, chases and escapes, romantic sojourns and heroic couplings, farce and slow death, a trickle of goodness, an avalanche of folly, evil and waste. The immersion in language recalls Joyce, Pynchon and Barth; the fecundity of invention recalls John Irving and Gabriel Marquez. They are fabulists all, makers of fable. Boyle is probably closest to Irving in his openness to the reader. His writing is somehow rich but not dense to the point of obscurity; he is vivid and surprising, boisterous but in the end lethal, a laughing executioner, so to speak, of the arrogant designs and ill-considered dreams, the imperious schemes and insensitive undertakings of men who history knows should have known better. The writers out of academia often seem to have written only for each other but, like Irving—who I understand has been a mentor to Boyle—Boyle reaches beyond the ivy to embrace and entertain a wide audience. Boyle's deliberate mixing of old and new words, in the narrative and (more rarely) in the speech, does not always come off. Like Godard's cinematic devices to let no one forget it's a film, not life, Boyle's verbal juxtapositions in time sometimes work too jarringly well. But this is a small quibble about a large and important book by an important new writer.
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