Water Music (1981)

An ambitious but messy novel, which for me was more of a heroic failure than a triumphant success. I like the idea a lot: a fictionalised account of Mungo Park's travels to find the source of the Niger River, interspersed with the story of an invented London rogue called Ned Rise. The general approach is a sort of knockabout picaresque style, a comic novel of adventures, but unfortunately this does leave the whole thing feeling rather caricaturish. The London scenes in particular are like a cartoon version of a Hogarth painting, though with a modern willingness to dwell on the cheap sex and inhuman squalor of eighteenth-century city life.

This two-dimensionality does cause problems with tone. There are some appalling stories in here, especially when it comes to the female characters. Poor Fanny Brunch goes from servitude to extended sadomasochistic rape and torture to drug addiction to losing a baby to…well, to a nasty end. If this is supposed to be social commentary then a roustabout comic style is the wrong way to do it: it just feels trivial and cruel. Similarly, the final third of the book builds to an unhappy climax for pretty much everyone. But because the characters have so little depth, it doesn't seem particularly moving or tragic. It just seems relentless, and actually kind of depressing.

There are various other problems with the execution, some subjective, others more serious. I didn't like the way Boyle explained so much of his historical context. There are long paragraphs bringing readers up to speed on things like what the Sahel is, or where the Niger River is located. If you already know this, such passages feel patronising, and if you don't then it deprives you of the pleasure of investigating the novel's sidelines, chasing down references. The structure of the book is also a bit awkward, describing as it does both of Park's two African expeditions, with a detailed interlude in Scotland in between. The problem is that by the time we go back to West Africa for the final section of the novel, it feels like going backwards: we've seen it all before.

Most crucially, though, I have no idea what this book is actually about. What's it all for? I mean some of the set-pieces are a lot of fun, and there are some enjoyable bits of dialogue, but – there's just nothing behind it. There are no unifying themes at all, just incidents.

Boyle is clearly a huge Thomas Pynchon fan, and the book I couldn't help comparing this to was Pynchon's Mason & Dixon, another postmodern adventure novel about an eighteenth-century British explorer. Water Music does not emerge well from the comparison. Pynchon picked out little-known sidelines from the period – Vaucanson's mechanical duck, the transit of Venus – and he let the reader do at least half the work. For all Boyle's energetic prose style, his targets are too obvious or too cliché. Ultimately, Pynchon writes novels-of-ideas; Boyle doesn't seem to have any ideas. Without them, his rich vocabulary is left rudderless, and he throws words like hyetologist and remugient around a bit clumsily.

OK I've probably gone too far now. This is by no means a bad novel, and I enjoyed reading it – it's just a bit frustrating because there is a much better book in there somewhere. This was TC Boyle's first, and I would definitely like to read some of his others and see how his style has matured. In this case I unfortunately felt a bit too much like Mungo Park myself – on an eventful journey, but without any clear idea of where I was going or why. ( )

Voici un livre barbare, érudit, totalement imprévisible, salué par une critique éblouie qui évoqua à son propos 'Cent ans de solitude' de Garcia-Marquez et 'Tom Jones' de Fielding - rien de moins. En 1795, l'explorateur écossais Mungo Park découvre le royaume légendaire de Ségou et pense avoir élucidé l'énigme du Niger, ce fleuve mystérieux dont les géographes d'alors faisaient un affluent du Nil ! Retour triomphal en Angleterre, nouveau départ vers l'inconnu... Une navigation folle commence dans un univers romanesque qui réunit toutes les grandes formes du récit. Chassé-croisé des destins, ronde enivrante : un des plus grands romans d'aujourd'hui.

Water Music is another book I’m having trouble with review-wise. Maybe I’m not the intended audience for it. Come to think of it, I don’t know who is. A blurb on the back styles it as “The funniest, bawdiest, most adventure-filled novel to come along since Tom Jones”. Having never read Tom Jones I can’t say if this is accurate or not, but I did read Moll Flanders and if you liked that, you’ll probably like this, too.

Take the not-quite-likable cast of characters with Mungo Park taking the lead. Now, as protagonists go he’s pretty good. He gets a lot of screen time and during much of it he’s doing something pretty interesting. Not enviable, mind you, but at least interesting. The thing is, I didn’t really care all that much about him. During his most harrowing moments with Dassoud or in the grip of some awful disease or other (which I swear half of the book is devoted to describing. In great detail.) I didn’t really root for him. Somehow Boyle missed the mark in making me care. I think it was because Mungo himself didn’t really seem to care about anything except making a name for himself as an explorer. He isn’t much of one really. One of the Three Stooges might have made a better one. Probably Larry. When he’s not making a bad decision he’s doing something stupid, when he’s not doing something stupid he’s sick as a dog, when he’s not sick as a dog he’s being attacked or held prisoner and when he’s not doing any of those things he’s home with his family pining to go back and do it some more.

Interspersed with Mungo’s narrative is that of Ned Rise. A more wretched character I have yet to meet. Dickens didn’t go as far as Boyle did with Ned. Think of Fagin, Oliver or any of the other sorrier-than-sorry urchins-turned-criminal and then kick it up a few notches. Or down depending on how your mind works. But despite his callow sliminess and self-serving blindness, I liked Ned better than Mungo and so the ending suited me and probably suited Mungo, too.

The vignettes featuring Ailie and all she endures were nice breaks to the unrelenting action of the explorer bits. Just when things got too squalid, visceral and just plain gross we’re reprieved and sent back to Scotland to see what’s been left behind.

Not much as it turns out. Ailie is spends a lot of her time without Mungo pining for him and alternately being pissed that he left. When he is around she spends most of her time being pregnant. Such is life I guess.

None of that helped me figure out the intended audience for Water Music. Tropical disease specialists? Reincarnated 18th century explorers dying to reminisce? Jilted wives and lovers trying to understand their wayward men? Angry native guides looking to see how brainless the white man is? I don’t know, but I’ve never read anything quite like it and probably never will again. ( )

While Mungo Park is exploring the Niger River Valley, his wife deals in London with more concrete matters.

I've been having a bit of a fling with the eighties recently: coming back to Milan Kundera may have been a disappointment, but this early work by Boyle fully lived up to my memory of it. It's a lively, witty, original, and totally iconoclastic romp through the opening years of the nineteenth century, as unlike as it can be to the dull and routine writing of The Women. A young man's book, and a book that belongs to the postmodern spirit of the period in which it was written, full of clever little jokes and allusions that constantly undermine the narrative illusion. But still a pleasure to read, even thirty years later. ( )