Rating: 
Summary: Not Just Another Travel Novel
Review: Amazing in it's breadth, the story runs the gamut of laugh-out-loud funny to downright depressing, wisking you from London to the Highlands to the west coast of Africa and back again in a whirlwind. I couldn't put it down, reading through the whole five hours of a cross-country fight. But eventually the story stops being funny, stops being ironic, stops being insightful, and becomes unremarkable. I agree with others: Boyle should've ended this book a hundred pages earlier. It's as if he had the idea to run two stories and characters together, but got there faster than he thought, and then wasn't sure where to go. But because the majority of the book is so good, and because by the time the story starts to go lame the key plot line is really finished, I still highly recommend it. Boyles command of language and vocabulary is especially noteworthy, and he raises some good questions about the nature of exploration, cultural perceptions and what we perceive as civilized - or uncivilized - societies...with a dose of sex, drugs and clarinet music thrown in for good measure. (Note: written twenty years ago, it's also interesting to consider his depiction of Muslim peoples in light of the situation in the US, Middle East and Africa the last few years.)
Rating:
Summary: Not Just Another Travel Novel
Review: Amazing in it's breadth, the story runs the gamut of laugh-out-loud funny to downright depressing, wisking you from London to the Highlands to the west coast of Africa and back again in a whirlwind. I couldn't put it down, reading through the whole five hours of a cross-country fight. But eventually the story stops being funny, stops being ironic, stops being insightful, and becomes unremarkable. I agree with others: Boyle should've ended this book a hundred pages earlier. It's as if he had the idea to run two stories and characters together, but got there faster than he thought, and then wasn't sure where to go. But because the majority of the book is so good, and because by the time the story starts to go lame the key plot line is really finished, I still highly recommend it. Boyles command of language and vocabulary is especially noteworthy, and he raises some good questions about the nature of exploration, cultural perceptions and what we perceive as civilized - or uncivilized - societies...with a dose of sex, drugs and clarinet music thrown in for good measure. (Note: written twenty years ago, it's also interesting to consider his depiction of Muslim peoples in light of the situation in the US, Middle East and Africa the last few years.)
Rating: 
Summary: Superb Fiction on a Vivid Historical Backdrop
Review: Boyle evokes the mystery and hardship of Mungo Park's voyages to West Africa, while telling the tale of a London street-child who goes with him. Sad, funny, sweet and shocking, this book left me exhausted by its emotional intensity. Boyle is delightful to read (Try Budding Prospects and The Road to Wellville, too.
Rating: 
Summary: Quite Enjoyable
Review: Boyle is an excellent story teller, and "Water Music" is a terrific read. The narrative flows along at quite a clip as the plot ricochets between characters. Boyle's sense of humor is strong, and I found myself laughing out loud on more than one occasion. While a jacket review compares the work of Boyle to Pynchon, I find little grounds for this. The intellectual attributes of the book fail to approach that of any Pynchon. But why make such a comparison? Water music is a splendid story quite wonderfully told- an excellent beach book.
Rating:
Summary: Snide and Clever
Review: Boyle is most definitely a writer for the present -- trendy, snide, clever, precious, and sounding as if he'd just graduated from some foul Master of Fine Arts in Writing program. I kept picking this novel up because of the gasping praise of the reviewers and the fact that I find Mungo Park rather interesting, but I just kept putting it back down after finding, once again, that it was simply not to my taste. Boyle is supposedly very inventive -- I find him rather tedious and predictably contemporary. MFA stuff, approved by the professors of "creative writing," but ultimately pretty hollow and trendy, like any other fashion statement. For those who like their writing with the MFA seal of approval.
Rating:
Summary: An absolutely tremendous book. Buy this for your friends!
Review: Boyle, one of my favorite authors, is a black-humored satirist. His books are usually based on historical events and people, but that's where the reality usually ends. Water Music is ostensibly about the "discovery" of the Niger River by a Scotsman named Mungo Park in the late 1700s. In actuality, the book follows the parallel lives of the fictional "Ned Rise", a Dickensian sort of sleazebag and smalltime thief, and Mungo Park, a renaissance man of sorts whose travels and yearnings take him back and forth from Africa to Europe more regularly than his family wishes. The book, arranged in blocks of flashbacks and essays rather than formal chapters, is sprinkled with all of the other quirky historical events that occurred at the time of this story. Boyle, whose short fictions I have also enjoyed in The New Yorker, tells a story that reaches all of the senses, and his books are a mess of smells, tastes, sights, and sounds, not to mention an open door on the raw sexual and animal side of humankind. Like Roahl Dahl (author of such children's stories as Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, and James and the Giant Peach), Boyle's protagonists always seem to end up where and how they should, the bastard always seems to get what he deserves... which is rich and satisfying for as emotional a reader as I am. i always have 3-4 copies on my shelves to give out to friends who haven't read it.
Rating:
Summary: This may be the most enjoyable book I've ever read! Muscular
Review: Hilarious and touching. Intimate, moving, insightful, ironic, historical, sweeping. The word that kept coming to mind to describe Boyle's writing style in this book is "muscular". I thoroughly enjoyed this book! His "Road to Wellville" had me laughing out loud. (Don't judge it by the movie, which sucked.
Rating:
Summary: If you are looking for a absolutely MUST READ - this is it!
Review: I did not expect too much from this book because I simply did not know anything about it. Boyle nearly knocked me off my chair with this witty, funny, tragic and most of all masterly composed story of a handful of people somehow connected with each other.
If you did not read this book, do not think any further. Read it!
Rating:
Summary: What a fun read!
Review: I didn't want it to end because it was so much fun to read. Boyle's descriptions are so good that you don't have to "work" to be lost in the story and visualize every character and place. It was a great escape. Better than the movies!
Rating:
Summary: Fictionalization of Mungo Park's own "Travels" book
Review: I enjoyed reading this book and I thought it was quite good, until I discovered Mungo Park's (the book's main character) own "Travels in the Interior of Africa" (1798) written after his first expedition to Africa. Most of the things that I thought were clever and imaginative in Boyle's book come straight from Park's first hand account. Boyle should have acknowledged Park's book in his novel and made it more clear what he invented himself and what Park actually wrote. If you are seriously interested in history and adventure travel, read Park's book.
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