Water Music It all begins In 1795 when Mungo Park, a young Scottish explorer, off to chart the River Niger finds himself held prisoner by a tribe of Moors who almost grind his eyes out, almost castrate him, and almost starve him to death. But he is saved by a combination of wits and pure cosmic luck, luck that manages to see him through more wild adventures than one thought possible to cram into 456 pages of fiction. Boyle's fiction has been justly compared to John Barth's and Thomas Pynchon's. It is surreal, erudite, and fascinated by Ianguage. But it also boasts an essential feature which the other two authors' works often lack: vivid human characters. To be sure, these aren't the folks next door. There's Ned Rise, a crippled London con artist who, among other things, robs graves and sponsors the first live sex acts in pubs. There's Johnson, a Mandingo sold into slavery, who winds up back in Africa as Mungo's Pope-reading guide. If anything, this reads like a 20th century Dickens novel. It is wild and astonishing.
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