8.4 /10 1 Votes
Country United States Publication date January, 1982 Dewey Decimal 813/.54 19 Publisher Little, Brown and Company Pages 437 pp | 4.2/5 Goodreads Language English ISBN 0-316-10467-1 Originally published 1981 Genre Novel OCLC 7733729 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Media type Print (hardcover & paperback) Similar World's End, Budding Prospects, The Road to Wellville, Riven Rock, East Is East | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Water Music is the first novel by T. C. Boyle, first published in 1982. It is a semi-fictional historical adventure novel that is set in the late 18th and early 19th century.
Contents
Plot
The novel follows the parallel adventures and intertwining fates of its protagonists Ned Rise, a luckless petty criminal, and the famous explorer Mungo Park - the first a purely fictional character, the latter based on a historical person. The book takes place in various locales in Scotland, England and Western Africa. It revolves around two Imperial British expeditions into the interior of Western Africa in an effort to find and explore the Niger River.
The novel is loosely based on historical sources, including Mungo Park's 1816 book, Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa. However, as Boyle admits in his foreword to Water Music, he does not claim historical accuracy or even faithfulness to the contemporary accounts, whose reliability is doubtful anyway.