I might never have found my new favorite book, T. Coraghessan Boyle's Water Music, if not for the friend who recommended it (thanks M.Co!). Unfortunately, Eric got to it first and I was forced to endure much snickering and chuckling as he devoured it. But finally, I can testify that the parts one and two ("The Niger" and "The Yarrow") are indeed laugh-out-loud funny, as they track the hapless and unlikely hero, the Scottish explorer Mungo Park, on his first expedition in West Africa and back home in Britain.

Mungo Park was an actual eighteenth-century explorer, one of many European men determined to find the fabled city of Timbuktu and the Niger River (or die trying, as was more common). But Boyle, who has fashioned several novels after historical characters and events, explains in his Apologia:

I have been deliberately anachronistic, I have invented language and terminology, I have strayed from and expanded upon my original sources. Where historical fact proved a barrier to the exigencies of invention, I have with full knowledge and clear conscience, reshaped it to fit my purposes.

Perhaps wishing to err on the side of caution, Boyle has overstated his case. The dates and directions of the fictional expeditions do not stray too far from the real ones, and much of the cast of characters is true to life. In reality, though, Mungo Park was not the "holy fool" that he is in Water Music. Where the fictional Park is a cousin of Candide or Dostoevsky's Idiot, the real man must have been intrepid, undaunted, and strong as an ox, with a constitution that resisted the tropical diseases that felled every European around him. (On his second trip, he left what is now the coast of Senegal with 30 troops and arrived at the Niger with 11; by the time his little raft the Joliba left Segu, only four men remained from the original group.)

An entirely factual book about Mungo Park would make good reading, but it’s several major inventions of Boyle’s -- the tireless and bloodthirsty Moor, Dassoud; Ned Rise; the imagined inner life of Park's lifelong love, Ailie Anderson -- and hundreds of other minor artistic liberties that really bring Water Music to life.

Warning: I’m going to spoil the end of the book, which, by the way, sticks to the real-life events, as well as they are known.

In the third part, "Niger Redux," the picaresque adventurer is transformed into the leader of a doomed mission. (I see a Werner Herzog movie based on the novel, starring a charming and deranged Klaus Kinski.) The expedition is reduced to five men, most of whom are too weakened by disease to really work. Their bright uniforms are reduced to rags, their craft is a raft made from two discarded boats, and they are reduced to animals just trying to survive. In the end, it is both the river and the natives that kill them.