Sara Sheridan's story about Water Music

Water Music by T C Boyle is the book that changed my life. I’m always banging on about this book. I’ve bought it as a present for so many people that they are surprised in my local bookshop if it’s not in the pile when I get to the till. TC Boyle definitely owes me a drink – I’ve told so many people about his gem of a story of Mungo Park’s doomed trips to find the source of the Niger on the cusp of the 18th and 19th centuries.

Water Music is not a story for the faint-hearted but from the moment I picked it up I was gripped. I’d always loved reading non-fiction history books. There is something fascinating about seeing where different elements of our culture come from, be it the political changes instigated by William Pitt, the economic ideas of Adam Smith or the grim details of the underbelly of life in Edinburgh (where I live) in the social documents that give descriptions of prostitutes living around the Cowgate two hundred years ago (how much, I wonder, in that regard, has really changed?). I love language too, of course, and echoing across the ages there is sometimes a hint of where a word started out and a story that forms about how its usage developed – all that stuff fascinates me. I spend a good deal of my time in the library to this day, looking at original material from the archives and that’s what I’m really looking for – details that resonate. But until the day I picked up Water Music the historical fiction I’d read was a romantic representation of how the world used to be – a series of interesting, fun stories. With this book (kind of like a time machine) it felt as if I was actually there – in the stink of London in 1795 or the squalid, fetid swamps of the Fever Coast in 1806. The story is so well written that it feels natural to imagine what is now an alien era before modern medicine, before the whole world was mapped and package holidayed - a time when, if you had an education and a spirit of adventure, you had the whole of the burgeoning British Empire to explore. And it was dangerous. That kind of adventure isn’t available any more and it really grabbed me by the throat.

I probably wouldn’t have started writing historical fiction if Boyle hadn’t shown me how powerful it could be so maybe, in fact, I owe him a drink after all. His story is in terrible taste, it’s filthy, rambunctious and wildly politically incorrect (I do feel I have to warn you) but, like Frankenstein’s monster, it lives, and that is a valuable and very rare thing on our bookshelves. He’s an absolute master. You should give it a go.