worthy first encounter with Boyle

books:

	• Water Music (The Penguin Contemporary American Fiction Series) T.C. Boyle Penguin (Non-Classics), 1983 - 464 pages average customer review:based on 33 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

highly recommended

I am a new fan of Boyle

This was the first book I have read by T.C. Boyle but it will certainly not be the last. I would have never expected a semi-historical account of the exploration of the Niger River to be so entertaining. An excellent read.

This book rocks!

I think it may be the best of all Boyle's books. It's a little long, but (with the exception of a few unneccesary detours) it definitely holds your interest from beginning to end. Few authors have the talent to mix comedy and tragedy like T.C. Boyle, and "Water Music" is Exhibit A.

for more information click here

Not Exactly Handel...

A note to the putative reader who is not already enraptured by Boyle and his writings (as many of the reviewers here are), it's going to take a bit of getting used to, to put it mildly. Boyle comes at you full throttle from the first chapter with his, at first, somewhat, disorienting take on Mungo Park and his journeys. What may hold you back from continuing with the book is its nonpareil emetic effect. As other reviewers have asserted you will need an unabridged dictionary of the normal sort, but also, it wouldn't hurt you to have a medical dictionary as well to cover all the diseases, infestations, degenerations, suppurations etc. to which our mortal coils are heir, not only the diseases that might afflict one in the African wasteland, but (perhaps) even more so, in Eighteenth Century London itself, where the streets reeked of excrement. You may be tempted by this onrush of man's inhumanity to man topped off my other critters' inhumanity to him (It is no accident that Boyle begins the book with a quote from Burns' "To A Louse".) to give up on the book in disgust, as I very nearly did. This would be a very serious mistake, gentle reader, because somewhere along the way, I'm not exactly sure where it happened for me, the book becomes VERY, VERY funny. You begin to notice how the chapter headings resemble titles or lines from your favourite books or poems. It is no mere sop to the book's title to say that you actually begin to FLOW along with the ribaldry, bawdiness, humanity, inhumanity and literary retakes - I, purposefully, do not call them send-ups because I don't think that's what Boyle's about here - of your favourite works. Rather, these constitute a rethinking of what your favourite works perhaps left out, in a very comic mode, yes, but also, it will strike you, in a very realistic manner as well. All this you will see typified toward the end of the book in Park's absurdly whitewashed account of what you know all too well to be a perfectly mad, afflicted, disease and disaster ridden affair. I think I knew I was immune to the gruesomeness of the book and more in key with its music, so to speak, when I merely chuckled when one of the explorers on the second voyage went mad and tore off the end of a four foot parasitic worm nestled in a vein of his leg, which he very well knew would kill said worm, causing gangrene and death. His body is unceremoniously dumped over the boat shortly thereafter.

No doubt, ahem, deeper things are at play here. But I'm not writing a dissertation. Water Music is fun, fluent, fissiparous. I'll just quote here from one of the more reflective passages:

"A year is nothing: a feather in the breeze, a breath of air. Turn around and it's gone. Ice, bud, leaf, twig. Geese on the pond, stubble in the field. Three hundred sixty-five mornings, three hundred sixty-five nights. Minor lacerations, a sprained ankle, runny nose, the death of a distant relative. There's a squirrel in the attic, a tree down in a storm. The clock in the hallway cranks round seven hundred and thirty times. Windows are raised, shades drawn, dishes, cups and spoons dirtied and scrubbed, dirtied and scrubbed. Thunder hits the hills like a mallet, snow climbs the fenceposts, sunlight burnishes the windows like copper. A year. One of how many: fifty? Sixty? The days chew away at it, insidious." P.187

So please read this book before the days gnaw you down.

for more information click here

Great First Novel

T. C. Boyle's novel, Water Music, is an amazing mix of Dickens, Heller, and Burroughs. It is a globetrotting epic of a novel that juxtaposes the lives of two wildly different characters in late 18th/early 19th century England and Africa. Mungo Park is a less than intrepid explorer who has been tasked with finding the source of the Niger River. Ned Rise is a pornographer, graverobber, and purveyor of fine caviar.

While Park hobnobs with the London elite, propelled to fame by lurid tales of a purportedly successful expedition to Africa, Rise rots in Newgate Prison. In 1805 both men went to Africa, Park as an explorer returning for one last glorious expedition, Rise as a convict. When they finally meet on an expedition intended to map the full course of the Niger River, they run into one of Park's old enemies, and this amazing story of love, sex, war, and mayhem races to an amazing conclusion.

T. C. Boyle's first book of fiction, The Descent of Man, was released in 1979 to critical acclaim. Water Music was released two years later after three years of writing. Talk Talk, Boyle's 18th book and 11th novel was released by Viking in 2006. Boyle holds a Ph.D in 19th century British literature from the University of Iowa, and teaches English at the University of Southern California.

Water Music is an excellent novel, the product of a consummate storyteller whose fluid, confident prose leaps from the page. Boyle's characters are rich and compelling, even the secondary ones. Johnson, Park's guide, was a slave sent from Africa to Carolina who became a valet to a wealthy Englishman in London, and finally was condemned to be a convict back in Africa. The only fee he demanded for his services as a guide was a copy of the complete works of Shakespeare.

In the world of Water Music, Johnson is fairly ordinary, for it is a zany world of fateful meetings, crimes of passion, and star-crossed lovers. That world is hard to leave.

Water Music is both a great story and a scathing critique of British Imperialism, and Boyles' fantastic semi-fictional Africa is a place well worth exploring. Much like the Niger River that is so central to its plot, this book twists and turns through palaces and slums, Bedouin camps and Scottish villages, but Boyle's critique of Park's missions as a "geographical missionary" never lets up.

Boyle's diction and plotting is reminiscent of another writer whose novels were both entertaining and full of social commentary, Charles Dickens, but Boyle largely avoids long passages in which nothing happens that plague Dickens' longer works. Unfortunately, Water Music drags a bit towards the end.

For readers that want to be engrossed in a truly great story, a story that is both fantastic and factual, Water Music is a great selection.

for more information click here

worthy first encounter with Boyle

When I first read this, my first encounter with Boyle's style, I had been so used to the kind of fiction that easily translates into a ninety-minute movie or at least a mini series, even if it never goes beyond development hell. In this sense, this book was and continues to be my salvation. Despite being based on the life of a real person, the world of this book would not make sense anywhere else except in the world of this book. The humor that takes place, the pain that develops, the frustrations and celebrations are intimately tied to this world constructed by Boyle for the explorer Mungo Park. I didn't want to leave.

for more information click here

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

T.C. Boyle?s riotous first novel?now in a new edition for its 25th anniversary

Twenty five years ago, T.C. Boyle published his first novel, Water Music?a funny, bawdy, extremely entertaining novel of imaginative and stylistic fancy that announced to the world Boyle?s tremendous gifts as a storyteller. Set in the late eighteenth century, Water Music follows the wild adventures of Ned Rise, thief and whoremaster, and Mungo Park, a Scottish explorer, through London?s seamy gutters and Scotland?s scenic highlands?to their grand meeting in the heart of darkest Africa. There they join forces and wend their hilarious way to the source of the Niger. BACKCOVER: ?Ribald, hilarious, exotic?an engrossing flight of the literary imagination.?
?Los Angeles Times

?Water Music does for fiction what Raiders of the Lost Ark did for film. . . . Boyle is an adept plotter, a crazed humorist, and a fierce describer.?
?The Boston Globe

?High comic fiction . . . Boyle is a writer of considerable talent. He pulls off his most implausible inventions with wit, a perfect sense of timing, and his considerable linguistic gifts.?
?The Washington Post

for more information click here

hot