A raindrop falling on the head of King Ashurbanipal in the Mesopotamian city of Nineveh 2600 years ago kicks off the sweeping novel There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak. The drop of water resurfaces as a snowflake on the tongue on a newborn baby on the banks of the river Thames in 1840, in a water bottle in Iraq in 2014 and, finally, as a teardrop on a houseboat in London in 2018. Shafak interweaves three stories to make an epic, enjoyable journey through time and geographies.
The newborn baby, befittingly named King Arthur of the Sewers and Slums, turns out to be an unusually gifted child. After crawling his way out of a Dickensian slum, he becomes a distinguished Assyriologist working at the British Museum. In search of the missing tablets of the poem the Epic of Gilgamesh, he travels to Mesopotamia and falls in love in more than one way.
Living in rural poverty in south-east Turkey at the time of ISIS’s invasion of Iraq, Narin has a different kind of deprived childhood. On a pilgrimage to banks of the Tigris, Narin and her grand-mother get caught up in ISIS’s genocide of Yazidis on Mount Sinjar in what is, by far, the most harrowing part of this book.
Jumping back to London, Zaleekhah, a hydrologist, has just moved out of her marital home and into a houseboat on the Thames. Zaleekhah has plenty of traumas to deal with, the loss of her parents in a flood at the age of seven, her complicated relationship with her tempestuous, billionaire uncle Malek and now, the breakdown of her marriage.
As you will have guessed, water is a major theme in this novel. Water as a source and threat to life, and as a continuously recycled element connecting us to the past. Shafak tackles many – perhaps too many – other big issues: the largely ignored history of Mesopotamia, colonialism, the persecution of Yazidis, the effect of climate change in the Middle-East, ownership of cultural heritage.
It’s Shafak’s storytelling mixed in with some compelling characters which makes this novel a pleasure to read. I developed a soft spot for the urchin Arthur, a real Dickensian hero. The well-meaning but cynical and domineering Uncle Malek also leapt off the page. I got curious about the history of Mesopotamia, about which I know nothing. Of the three stories, Arthur’s is the one that stands out, whereas Narin’s is the weakest, surprising given the combustible topic.
Shafak occasionally veers off into melodrama and her metaphors sometimes falter, but I forgive her for this book kept me going. If you’re after a compulsively readable story to take you far, far away, this is it.
There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak is published by Penguin, 496 pages.
