A note to the putative reader who is not already enraptured by Boyle and his writings (as many of the reviewers here are), it's going to take a bit of getting used to, to put it mildly. Boyle comes at you full throttle from the first chapter with his, at first, somewhat, disorienting take on Mungo Park and his journeys. What may hold you back from continuing with the book is its nonpareil emetic effect. As other reviewers have asserted you will need an unabridged dictionary of the normal sort, but also, it wouldn't hurt you to have a medical dictionary as well to cover all the diseases, infestations, degenerations, suppurations etc. to which our mortal coils are heir, not only the diseases that might afflict one in the African wasteland, but (perhaps) even more so, in Eighteenth Century London itself, where the streets reeked of excrement. You may be tempted by this onrush of man's inhumanity to man topped off my other critters' inhumanity to him (It is no accident that Boyle begins the book with a quote from Burns' "To A Louse".) to give up on the book in disgust, as I very nearly did. This would be a very serious mistake, gentle reader, because somewhere along the way, I'm not exactly sure where it happened for me, the book becomes VERY, VERY funny. You begin to notice how the chapter headings resemble titles or lines from your favourite books or poems. It is no mere sop to the book's title to say that you actually begin to FLOW along with the ribaldry, bawdiness, humanity, inhumanity and literary retakes - I, purposefully, do not call them send-ups because I don't think that's what Boyle's about here - of your favourite works. Rather, these constitute a rethinking of what your favourite works perhaps left out, in a very comic mode, yes, but also, it will strike you, in a very realistic manner as well. All this you will see typified toward the end of the book in Park's absurdly whitewashed account of what you know all too well to be a perfectly mad, afflicted, disease and disaster ridden affair. I think I knew I was immune to the gruesomeness of the book and more in key with its music, so to speak, when I merely chuckled when one of the explorers on the second voyage went mad and tore off the end of a four foot parasitic worm nestled in a vein of his leg, which he very well knew would kill said worm, causing gangrene and death. His body is unceremoniously dumped over the boat shortly thereafter.No doubt, ahem, deeper things are at play here. But I'm not writing a dissertation. Water Music is fun, fluent, fissiparous. I'll just quote here from one of the more reflective passages:"A year is nothing: a feather in the breeze, a breath of air. Turn around and it's gone. Ice, bud, leaf, twig. Geese on the pond, stubble in the field. Three hundred sixty-five mornings, three hundred sixty-five nights. Minor lacerations, a sprained ankle, runny nose, the death of a distant relative. There's a squirrel in the attic, a tree down in a storm. The clock in the hallway cranks round seven hundred and thirty times. Windows are raised, shades drawn, dishes, cups and spoons dirtied and scrubbed, dirtied and scrubbed. Thunder hits the hills like a mallet, snow climbs the fenceposts, sunlight burnishes the windows like copper. A year. One of how many: fifty? Sixty? The days chew away at it, insidious." P.187So please read this book before the days gnaw you down.