Water Music is a playful re-imagining of the adventures of Mungo Park, the Scottish explorer who attempted to chart the course of the Niger River in Africa. His story is interwoven with the stories of Ned Rise (a British scalawag with great talent for nearly getting killed) and a handful of other colorful characters. T.C. Boyle's prose is inventive and anachronistic, and he has a knack for crafting one or two sentences that jump off of each page.

I wanted to like Water Music a lot more than I actually did. The plot is surprisingly tedious, and the regular bits of clever wordplay weren't enough to save it. I quite liked the Ned Rise character, and would have enjoyed a novel about him alone, but the frequent changes of viewpoint gave the novel a start/stop rhythm that was hard to get into.

I'd like to try another of Boyle's novels because this one was almost in my sweet spot.