Combining the stories of two men - Mungo Park, high-flying adventurer, and Ned Rise, resourceful scoundrel - the novel takes us deep into the black, forbidding continent of Africa and the murky gutters of low life London at the beginning of the 19th century.
On his quest for the legendary river Niger, Park does not only have to face the adversities of a hostile natural environment and climate; he is also confronted with cultures and life forms so alien to Western civilization it makes the reader's hair stand on end. As the story unfolds, he is more and more drawn into a quagmire of barbaric rites, atrocities and utter cruelty in a world of atavistic instinct where the white man has no place and no right to be.
In an ironic juxtaposition, Mungo's plight is echoed in Ned's struggle for survival in the streets of London where life is nothing but a faint reverberation, a mere parody of civilization.
The destinies of the two men become inexorably entangled when they encounter each other on Mungo's fated second expedition along the Niger, which will turn out to be Dante's Inferno come alive.
This may sound like a rather glum and gruesome account of the dark sides of 19th century life - but it isn't that at all - far from it! True - the story is an insane trip through darkness and hell. But it is a trip at times so comic and absurd it makes your sides split. Boyle mixes it all up and spills it out for us to gulp down - the hilarity and the horror, the irony and the compassion, the spirituality and the desecration, the commonplace and the bizarre, the beauty and the deformity. The result is a highly intense and intoxicating concoction that picks you up and flings you down, that makes you laugh and cry and wince almost at the same time.
The story is just one great big hyperbole. There is too much of everything - it wallows in dirt, filth and excrement, it is gory, it is gross; it is full of depravity and (sexual) deviation, it is more often than it is not sick and disgusting - it is brilliant. Written by a lesser author it might just be revolting. But Boyle is a masterful plotter and a compelling storyteller. And his command of the language is absolute - he searches its deepest recesses and comes up with phrases so vivid and colourful and images so forcible they make you see, make you hear, make you feel, make you smell - and sometimes make you squirm.
This book grips your imagination - once it has got hold of you it doesn't let go. The story keeps its relentless pace from the first page to the last - it is chock-a-block with action, brimming with monstrous, larger-than-life characters and gripping detail - it kept me spellbound until the very end.
Water Music is yet another masterpiece adding to Boyle's reputation as one of the most versatile and imaginative writers of our times.